


Down the Rabbit Hole

by hypnoticwinter



Series: Down the Rabbit Hole [1]
Category: Mystery Flesh Pit, Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Exploration, F/F, F/M, Growth, Horror, LGBTQ Themes, Mystery, Novel, Thriller, flesh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 74,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28129554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypnoticwinter/pseuds/hypnoticwinter
Summary: Roan Dzilenski is a reporter on a ticking clock, who stumbles accidentally across one of the biggest and meatiest mysteries of the last decade: what really happened at Mystery Flesh Pit in 2007, and what is happening inside the high fence and patrolled trails of the former National Park today in 2011? Her dogged pursuit of the truth leads her straight down the rabbit hole, chasing knowledge that will either change, end, or perhaps save her life. Join Roan as she makes her way down the twisting internal veins and organs of the Permian Basin Superorganism, pursued by horrifying wildlife, anomalous circumstances, and an impending sense of doom.Will Roan discover the answers she seeks? Will she confront her demons and make peace with herself? Will she find love there in the steamy, meat-based interior anatomy of a gigantic monster from beyond the dawn of time? Or will she become just another morsel for the slumbering beast she’s trapped in?
Series: Down the Rabbit Hole [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2060763
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

It all starts in a traffic jam. It's five in the afternoon just outside of Corpus Christi and I and my poor old Elantra with the broken AC are stuck in a traffic jam because some jackhole decided he wanted to cut across five lanes of traffic cause he missed his exit, and got mangled by a semi truck. And then compounded by all of the damn lookey-loos slowing down to a crawl as they squirm through the two lanes still open, the metaphorical arteries of the gigantic beast that is the United States highway system, trying to get a good look at something gory on the way home.

Meanwhile I'm slowly melting into my seat, barely able to keep my eyes open. I keep glancing over at the water bottle I'd set snugly into the passenger seat but just the way the sun's reflecting off of it makes me sick thinking about how warm the water would be by now.

I'm a few cars back from the wreck now. A police officer, looking sweaty and tired, steps out into the road, stopping traffic to let a couple of paramedics cross. A loud radio ad is playing in the car next to me and I look over. The guy in it looks about as done with this as I feel. I smile to myself, go back to watching the wreck.

The paramedics have stopped now and are talking to the policeman in the middle of the road. He looks annoyed, gestures at the cars ahead of him. One of the paramedics shakes his head and points back towards one of the cars.

The radio ad ends and the throbbing beat of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" comes on and I find myself singing along without even thinking about it.

_Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray_

_South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio..._

Another paramedic joins the group in the middle of the highway and then they hustle over to the wreck. The police officer gestures and we move fractionally forwards, then stop again. The asshole in the giant pickup truck ahead of me has decided to stop and watch them peel the door off the crushed sedan like the scab off a fresh cut. I can see something pink and fleshy and hurt-looking inside, where the driver's seat ought to have been, and I look away quickly.

_We didn't start the fire_

_It was always burning since the world's been turning..._

I end up meeting the eyes of the guy in the car next to me. He's bobbing his head along to Billy Joel and gives me a somewhat sheepish, embarrassed look. He's balding, looks about forty. I roll my eyes and smile at him and he smiles back. Someone behind me honks and I twist backwards and give him the finger. We're rolling forwards so slowly that it's absurd to even honk, just people blowing off steam. I suppose on some level it's equally absurd to give him the finger for it, but whatever.

_Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball_

_ARPANET, Free Tibet, what's in Mystery Flesh Pit?_

_Buddy Holly, "Ben Hur", space monkey, Mafia_

_Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go..._

Wait. What?

Now that we're past the wreck the highway widens out. More lanes open and the guy next to me merges over to the left. Billy Joel's voice disappears into engine noises and honks and the sound of the wind whipping past my open windows, but I still keep thinking about the lyrics I had just mouthed along to.

What the hell is Mystery Flesh Pit?

I glance over at the phone sitting in its holster on the dash but after the grisly reminder I'd just had of the fragility of human life and the hubris of treating cars like toys, I think better of it. I shift a lane or two to the right, get in line for my exit, and then I'm off the freeway. I make every light on the way to my apartment, all four of them, and it's just enough time that I can forget about the line in the song and instead jump into the shower and let the cold water run over me for fifteen minutes, which turns into thirty, which turns into forty-five, which turns into an hour.

When I get out I'm shivering but the warm Texas air blowing through my open window wraps me up like a warm hug, and I shrug into a flannel shirt, leave it unbuttoned. I put my cigarette out, leave it crumpled in the ashtray. I'd just emptied it this morning before I went to work, I can stand for it to get a little messy again.

The letter I received yesterday is on the kitchen table where I'd dropped it. The envelope is still on the floor somewhere. I think about going back and reading it again but I don't want to. I know what it says.

Outside, down in the courtyard, an old man is taking his dog for a walk. There is a vast darkened array of clouds closing in from the east and it already smells like rain, the wind is carrying it. I might take a walk too, later tonight.

I go back to the dresser and take my shirt off, slip a bra on, and then put the shirt back on. I almost light another cigarette, then I stop myself.

What the hell is Mystery Flesh Pit?

I had almost forgotten. Almost, but not quite. Billy Joel got stuck in my head and while I'd been puttering I'd hummed along until I got to that verse.

I shake my head and go get my laptop, type it into google half-expecting to find a porn site. A few travelogue type posts, a Wikipedia page...I click on that one and get hit with a redirect. Permian Basin Superorganism Containment Agency? ("Mystery Flesh Pit" redirects here. For the now closed U.S. National Park, see...)

I read the page, and then I stop. The growing sense of unease I felt while I devoured the Wikipedia article is now almost too much for me to handle.

This can't possibly be real. This has to be a prank or something, some kind of internet joke gone out of control. I click on the link to the National Park and see pictures, too many and too high quality to be faked. It's like something out of a Michael Crichton novel but it's real. It has to be.

I read about gullets and bones and digestion, about an ancient animal of some kind living baked into the stone and earth outside of Gumption, Texas. I read about the sheer enormity of it, I read about how a mining company turned it into a tourist attraction, splitting its throat wide open with metal retaining walls and letting people ride an elevator a thousand feet down into its insides. I read, finally, about the 2007 disaster that closed the park, when a pump failed to activate and drowned the thing, making it wake up – god, wake up? – and swallow almost seven hundred people, making it spew caustic vomit so high into the air that there are still pockets of it being found here and there nearly a hundred miles away, burning into the ground and poisoning water tables. And the way they managed to get it to go back to sleep is classified by the US Government. Did they nuke it? Christ, Gumption is only...okay, well, it's about five hundred miles away, so I guess I'm a little less concerned, but, god, this happened in the same state as me and this is only the first time I'm hearing about it. July Fourth, 2007...

I realize after a moment, with a strange little knot in my stomach, that actually, I did hear about it. I wasn't in the state in 2007. It was four years ago, I'd just gotten out of school and I was still in Oklahoma, but I remember my parents telling me about an earthquake at midnight that they'd felt, that woke them up, knocked a couple of things over. I had never known...

I feel a little like I've just woken up and gone to the bathroom and looked outside and all of a sudden the sky is a bright green, and everybody I ask about it just looks at me really strangely and says that it's always been green.

I google all over the internet, looking at photos people have taken a decade ago on their family trips, hosted on filesharing sites or on ancient GeoCities-era pages. I see smiling families, people in hiking gear, people swimming inside biological hot springs, people digging pitons into great sheer walls of flesh, not minding the blood that gushes out. I see a shaky video someone's taken of their television, of CNN back on the Fourth of July, 2007, I see a vast bloody pit, carved into the great flat nothing of central Texas.

I know that there is something called the square cube law, and it's what prevents living things from getting too large. I google "mystery flesh pit square cube" and cross my fingers, still hoping that this is some kind of ingenious prank, but all I find is a thread on Yahoo Answers back in 2004 asking the same question, where a park ranger from, god, the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park answered to explain that because the Permian Basin Superorganism the park is centered around is so huge, so intertwined with the ground, the support it needs to avoid collapsing in on itself under its own weight is always present, and that the other issue with the square cube law, that ordinary blood circulation becomes very difficult at huge sizes, is avoided because the creature's blood circulates locally rather than through any sort of main system.

Alright. It's real. There's enough evidence, photographs, videos, spread across so many different web sites that it would be impossible to fake. I look up an old rating list of National Parks, making sure that it's from around 2004 or so, and find Mystery Flesh Pit near the bottom. The tiny two-sentence blurb describes it as "strange," "horrifying," and "easily skippable," so I guess that could also explain why I had never heard of it.

I look at the map I'd opened in another tab again; Gumption, Texas; a tiny little county named after a tiny little town, or so I've heard. I remember passing through Gumption once, very briefly, during a family road trip back when I was six, but obviously I don't remember much. The only reason I even recognize the name of the town is because at the time I thought it was a funny name and kept saying it to myself after I'd asked my mom what the word on the sign meant when we drove into town. Welcome to Gumption. I don't remember visiting the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, that's for sure. I think that would have stuck with little six-year-old me.

It'd be a solid day of driving, seven or eight hours on the road, not counting breaks for food, sleep, restroom. I grimace at the computer screen, then zoom the map out. Lubbock, though...I could take a plane to Lubbock. That'd be, what, like two hours? Maybe? And then rent a car, drive down to Gumption...

I swallow, then laugh at myself. Why bother? I think. Why bother driving down to look at some fences and security guards? It's closed off, the Wikipedia page said, nobody in or out, just some scientists and a sedative plant.

Flights are cheap. Ninety-nine dollars, ninety-five dollars. I start to type in the address to check my bank balance, then stop, fold the computer closed. I want a cigarette.

On my way out to the window my foot brushes against the envelope I'd left discarded on the floor and again I think of picking it up and putting it away, and again I leave it there. It doesn't really matter.

It'd be a horrible waste of money, probably. And I doubt I'd find anything really meaningful. Even if, you know, I use the excuse of going and looking around so I could write a story on it or something, I don't know if Jim, my editor, would really care that much. From what it seems, Mystery Flesh Pit is ancient history.

I take another look at the sheet of paper sitting on the table, curled over on itself like a dead spider. Fuck it, I think, then repeat myself out loud. I stub out the cigarette and go retrieve my cell phone, look up the phone number for American Airlines out of Corpus Christi airport. Fifteen minutes on hold later I am the proud owner of one business class ticket to Lubbock, Texas, leaving in four hours out of gate nine. I hang up the call and say "fuck it" aloud again because it makes me feel a little better, and then I go pack.

The plane ride is okay. Security was a bear and a half but it always is. I realized from the pleasant-unnerving swooping sensation in my stomach when we took off that it had been long enough since the last time I'd been on a plane that I had forgotten what it feels like. I was lucky to grab a window seat next to a little kid and his father; they didn't bother me as much as I'd expected. Once he turned to me to show me something on the handheld video game he was playing but his father quickly intercepted him and apologized to me; I was a little put out, honestly, I would have wanted to look at it. I'd forgotten to stick a book in my carry-on so I had been stuck staring out the window, and about a half hour in the plane had angled in such a way that the setting sun was glaring me right in the face and daring me to enjoy the scenery, so I did the most sensible thing I could and closed the shutter and tried to fall asleep. I think I managed to do so about fifteen minutes before we landed, which lead to me letting out a rather embarrassing yelp when the landing jolted me awake. The kid and his dad looked at me and I blushed, mentally kicking myself for blushing, but I smiled at them and shrugged and said that I'd fallen asleep and we had a laugh about it.

One of my earliest memories is coming home from school one day in tears because I had tripped and fallen getting out of the bus and everyone had laughed at me. I had felt so embarrassed that even little eight-year-old me knew that the only reasonable response would have been to curl up into a little ball and die, but my dad sat me down as soon as I got home and told me very seriously that the only way to maintain your sanity throughout life is by being capable of laughing at yourself.

Lubbock is alright, I guess. I rent a car at the airport and drive into town, and consider driving to Gumption that night, but I decide after some deliberation that it'll be better to do a little reconnaissance here first, if I really am going to make a story out of this. Am I? I've been treating that as my excuse so far and yeah, I brought my voice recorder and my camcorder and my SLR and plenty of film and extra batteries...but I guess I hadn't really taken it seriously.

The city's very alive at night, more so, it seems to me, than Corpus Christi, but I also don't get out very much. Everywhere I look there are clubs and shows and bars and things. I think about going to one but I shake my head at myself. Forget it. I find a Motel 6 and then a Waffle House and then in a couple of hours I feel better, and then a couple of hours after that I finally manage to fall asleep.

I wake up having slept like the dead. I think about going to Waffle House again for breakfast but think better of it after I sit up too quickly and my stomach gives an uneasy lurch in protest. I get dressed leisurely – it is my weekend, after all. For a moment I even manage to fantasize that I'll be able to catch a flight home in time to make it to work on Monday but then I laugh at myself, which I seem to be doing quite a lot of lately.

Barely a hundred miles away, Mystery Flesh Pit is waiting for me. I don't know what I'll find there – personally, I feel rather certain it'll be a hell of a let-down – but it feels nice to have a purpose for once, to feel as though my life is being put to some kind of use other than to see how many cigarettes I can smoke in a single day and still retain some dignity.

It's nice to not have to think.

I take a breath and throw some clothes on and get started on the hard part.

* * *

The guy mopping the floor at the bus stop:

"Excuse me, sir? Do you know anything about the Mystery Flesh Pit Disaster of 2007?"

"The what?"

Businessman on the street, approached while tying his shoes:

"Excuse me, sir? I'm doing some research on the Mystery Flesh Pit disast –"

"I'm sorry, lady, I don't have any money."

Lady at the counter of the pharmacy:

"Excuse me, ma'am? I'm trying to find out some information on the Mystery Flesh Pit, do you have a moment to talk about it?"

"Sure, honey, but I'm afraid I don't know that much about it. That was back in, what, 2003? 2004?"

"2007, actually. Did you ever happen to visit while the park was still operating?"

"It was a park? I just remember something about some sort of tunnel collapse."

"Right. Thanks for your time."

Guy at the 7-11, asked while filling up the tank on my car next to him:

"Hey, dude, you know anything about the Mystery Flesh Pit?"

"Went there once when I was a kid. Pretty cool. Why?"

"I'm a reporter, doing a story on it. You remember the disaster that closed it down?"

"It's closed now? That's lame. What happened?"

"Thing woke up and ate everybody."

"For real?"

"Yeah. I've been asking around, like nobody's heard about it. Kind of surprising."

He taps his finger to his chin. "You know," he says thoughtfully, "it has been like five years since then."

"Four years."

"Even so. People don't have any kind of attention span any more."

His pump clicks off and so does our conversation.

Yeah, alright, maybe it isn't a very representative group, but it seems like nobody cares. Is that reasonable? Well...seven hundred plus people died, most in pretty gruesome ways, according to Wikipedia. Then there were the, god, the thousand-plus people affected by the vomit and ejecta scattered hundreds of miles away. But people here in Lubbock don't seem to really care. You'd expect that from the rest of the nation, maybe, I don't know why somebody in Arkansas or Kentucky or Illinois or wherever would give a fuck if they didn't personally know somebody who was affected, but here? Just a hundred miles from the place or so?

Maybe they did a really good job of cleaning up the cities, maybe it's only the little towns and places where the legacy of it has really clung on. I know there has to be a story, somebody who was there, somebody who saw it. That jerky camcorder video of CNN is a start, but something real, something visceral, in the words of a survivor...

I put my cigarette out in one of those trashcan-cum-ashtrays that dot the corners of every city I've ever been to, Lubbock no exception. I get in the rental car and again forget that it has crank windows instead of buttons. "To the library, and step on it," I giggle to myself as I pull out into traffic. I feel a little lightheaded and I remember that I never bothered to eat anything.

Perusal of the newspaper archives at the Lubbock Public Library confirmed what I'd already assumed – that there was no big government coverup, there was no conspiracy of that sort. The disaster at the Mystery Flesh Pit was capital-letter Very Big News for about a month, back in 2007, at least in the area. The stories towards the end of the month cast a little light on why it didn't last, though – it wasn't ongoing, it was just sort of a one-and-done thing. Yeah, finding the caustic vomit everywhere kicked up another stink a week later but the Powers That Be seemed to get that under control fairly quickly, at least in more populated areas. After that there were grumblings about disclosure and fault and blame and all that, and quite a few articles about Anodyne Mining or whoever going bankrupt but by the end of the month, aside from a few overly sentimental memorial pieces dedicated to delicately sidestepping the exact causes of death of the people they were memorializing, the news had moved on.

A librarian pokes around the corner with a cart and smiles at me; I smile back at her. She's youngish, vaguely Latin-looking, long skirt, dark eyes. I scoot forward so she can pass behind me. I read on for a while, the faint swish of her skirt and the slim sliding sound of books going back into shelves registering dimly and pleasantly in the back of my mind. I put the paper down and stretch a little, and then I notice she's glancing over at me. I smile at her again.

"Doing some research?" she asks, and I nod.

"Yes," I say. "I'm a reporter for a paper in Corpus Christi and I'm doing a story on the Mystery Flesh Pit. Have you heard of it?"

As soon as the words pass my lips there's something dark and guarded lurking in her eyes that makes me perk my ears up. She waits a couple of seconds before she answers, clearly thinking of what to say, of how much to tell me. I mention, after a moment, that I'm surprised that so few people here in Lubbock seem to really remember it or care about it, and she nods, leans up against her cart.

"It was a big deal for a few weeks," she says, gesturing to the stack of papers next to me, "but after that I guess it just wasn't exciting any more. The only people who really remember it are out in all the small towns where it really affected them. Here, in Lubbock, they just had vans working overtime to clean everything up and then it was easy to forget about. Every now and then I hear about them finding another pile of it somewhere just...festering away out there in the desert, in places nobody's been for years, just leaking into the ground."

"Were you there?"

"No," she says, "but my brother was."

"I'm sorry," I tell her. I want to reach out and touch her or something but I don't know if she'd appreciate it, so instead I keep my sympathy subdued. "Is he - ?"

"No, no," she says quickly, "he's alright. He was a park ranger there, they ended up giving him an award or something, he saved about fifteen people from inside the Pit when it all happened. He, ah...it really fucked him up for a while," she says finally, giving me a grimace. "We haven't talked in a long time."

"I'm sorry," I say again. "That must have been hard, for both of you."

"Yeah," she says, cutting her glance downwards. "He always said some strange things about the disaster, real Alex Jones type shit. But he just couldn't, you know, move on at all. We got in a big fight about it and, well, that was that."

I wonder what to say for a moment before I cross my legs, set the newspapers aside. "You must have gone there, then, while it was still operating."

"Yes, plenty of times."

"What was it like?"

She laughs softly. "God, that's such a...like, where do I even begin, you know? Have you been to many other National Parks?"

"A few," I tell her. "Not as many as I'd have liked. Crater Lake, Devil's Tower, Badlands, Petrified Forest..."

"Real Midwest girl, aren't you?"

"Hey, Crater Lake is in Oregon, that's not the Midwest."

"I wasn't knocking it. Um. Well, it wasn't like any other park you've ever been to, I can guarantee that. It was like, you drive up to it and you park and you walk up these stairs to get to the main observatory building, and you get in there and you look down and there's just...skin. In a hole in the ground. It was extremely disconcerting. From that distance it didn't look real, it looked like it was plasticine or something, like it was a model. And there was something...I don't know, kind of lewd about it?"

"Lewd?"

"Yeah. The way they were spreading it open with these giant metal, like, flanges or whatever, and how it was all raw and pink around the opening...Freud would have had a field day with it."

"I still kind of can't believe they found this thing and thought opening a theme park was the best thing to do with it."

"It was the 70s," she shrugs. "Place is old, you know. Anyway, once you actually got down into it, it was...it was an experience. You rode this giant elevator down and they had a massive visitor center something like 1200 feet down inside the thing's throat, and you could look out the windows and see all this flesh outside. It was honestly like something out of a Stephen King novel, it was so surreal. I went there a bunch of times with my brother cause he got an employee discount and I could get in for five dollars and I saw at least ten people have panic attacks and hyperventilate."

"Would you say overall that it was, you know, a negative thing? Like, the park on the whole."

"No, absolutely not."

"Why's that?"

She licks her lips. "I think that it's really easy to forget how small we are. We've done all these great things, we've built civilizations, we've put people on the moon, we're exploring the bottom of the ocean, I think humanity in general likes to think that we have everything figured out." She shrugs. "Mystery Flesh Pit is a really good reminder that we know basically nothing. I mean, they were studying it but they knew practically nothing about it, not how big it was, not whether there were more creatures like it elsewhere in the world, not where it came from, not even if it was awake or if it could move or what the thing looked like as a whole. I think what they ended up doing with it is a good example of hubris, but as far as the experience of actually going down inside of it and walking around on a trail and, I don't know, watching macrobacteria roll past outside the fence or seeing something really weird moving around down there and seeing the park ranger guiding you not know what it is either, that's an experience I genuinely wish everybody got to have. It'll change your life."

"How did it change yours?"

She laughs. "Besides, you know, everything with the disaster and my brother and all that shit? Just going down there really made me realize who I was."

"Elaborate."

"You really are a reporter," she shakes her head. "Like I said, I figured out just how small I was and how – I don't know, how insignificant we really are. These days whenever I get worried or bothered or I stress out over something I think about standing there in the elevator looking up through the glass ceiling and watching the light get smaller and dimmer, like I was falling into a bottomless pit, and I find peace."

"Seems like an odd way to find peace."

"Different strokes, right? Anyway. I really ought to put these books away. Was there anything else you wanted to know?"

I think about it for a moment, then shrug. "I'm planning on heading down to Gumption tomorrow, aside from the pit itself is there anything else I ought to check out?"

She lets out a low whistle. "I think you're going to be very disappointed. They don't let anybody go to the pit any more, it's all sealed off, has been for years. And Gumption, well...that town has seen better days. I'll give you a tip, though, even though maybe I shouldn't. Look for my brother there, I know he still lives in town. I can't give you his number or his address, unfortunately, because I don't have them any more, but I know for a fact that he works at the only gas station in town, so ask around there and you'll be able to find him. His name's Peter; I'd tell you to tell him I sent you but I kind of get the feeling that might not get you very far."

I thank her for the tip and set the newspapers aside. If I head out tonight I might be able to get some good shots of the fence around Mystery Flesh Pit. I think of it, of the sunset, then discard the thought. Forget it. I'll need a whole day to really dig into it, I think. And more's the better. I have plenty of batteries, I have plenty of storage. Easy girl, there's no rush. Assuming they let me just walk up and start filming, but if I really hype myself up I can half-believe I could talk my way into at least getting some shots of the fence.

"Oh, and one last thing."

I blink, look back up at her. She has a faint smile on her face, probably from watching me zone out, that fades quickly. "Don't stay in Gumption too long."

* * *

The drive down to Gumption is dusty and hot. I get about halfway before I realize I'm not driving my poor old Hyundai, I'm driving a rental car, and that it has a functional air conditioner, and then I feel very silly, for though the wind certainly felt nice on the whole I would have much rather just rolled the windows up and sat in the cool air. I see a grand total of four other cars, all coming from Gumption, on the two-hour drive. It's mostly a straight shot but my phone tells me to take a county road that turns into just a dirt track towards the end that, after a little meandering, plops me out onto the main street of Gumption, Texas.

The research I'd done suggests that at one point Gumption had been a bustling little town, and initially its size would say that it still is. But as I drove slowly through the empty streets, nearly half of the buildings I saw were abandoned, and not the foreclosed sort with realtor's signs out front, but straight-up shattered-glass, boarded-windows, holes-in-the-roofs abandoned. The ones that weren't just looked sad, like no one was taking care of them properly. The cars parked on the street are all at least five years old, as best as I can tell. I see only two people out and about while I'm driving around at 15 miles an hour, getting some camcorder footage, cruising down the middle of the road. One, a youngish-looking black guy, keeps his head down and doesn't look at me, and the other, an old guy mowing his lawn, stares at me all the way down the street, until I turn the corner and pull onto the main road.

There's the gas station. I'm tempted to head to it right away but I refrain, look for a diner or something, but they're all closed – fairly permanently so. There's a McDonald's but it's so small it doesn't even have a drive-through, which is something I'd never seen before. There's a drug store and a liquor store and one of those tiny little storefront churches. I think about going to McDick's but instead turn into the gas station. The clerk, a haggard-looking woman, doesn't look up from her magazine when I walk in. I wander to the back and grab a Coke out of the fridge unit. They don't have a credit-card reader so I have to dig around in my wallet and find some bills. The entire exchange continues without any speech at all until I work up my nerve and lick my lips and ask her if there's a hotel around here somewhere.

She looks at me for a few moments and then jerks her head towards the road. Her voice sounds like a frog croaking. "There's a motel down the road a ways. When you pull out take a left and turn at Third street."

"Thanks."

"No problem."

"By the way."

"Yeah?"

"Can you tell me when Peter works?"

I had to think for a moment to remember his name. I have it written down in a notebook but it's out in the car. Her eyes flash a little more lively. "Who's asking?"

I think of what to say for a moment before I shrug. "A friend."

For a moment I think she's going to tell me to fuck off, but something in my face must have convinced her. "He's off today. Come in tomorrow at eight or nine at night, he'll be here."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it."

I walk out the door and the heat hits me like a brick wall across a highway. I blow a breath out and lean up against the rough concrete edge of the gas station building and drink my Coke.

It's four in the afternoon and it'll take me maybe half an hour to drive down to Mystery Flesh Pit. It'll be cooler, too, in the evening, and if this town is any indication I doubt there'll be much of a line. I wonder where the people who work there live; maybe they have a dormitory there or something. Clearly they don't live here. Maybe there's some little patch of suburbs somewhere, behind those hills over there, maybe, where all the people are, but it's four in the afternoon and I've seen a grand total of three other cars driving around, so maybe not.

The guy at the motel gives me a nicer greeting than the lady at the 7-11 did, although not by much; at least I get a few dirty molars of a smile out of him as he hands me the key to my room. I had to wake him up from his nap at the front desk in order to get the room to begin with, and though I tried to do so as gently as I could he still started and almost fell out of his chair.

"Here for the pit?" he asks as I'm about to leave, and I turn back, glance at him.

"Yeah," I say after a moment. "Just going to see what's there now."

"You're heading over now?"

"Yes."

"Huh," he grunts after a moment. "Most of you folks don't do that 'till dark."

I frown. "Us folks?"

"You know, you..." his eyes roam over my face and his mouth drops open very slightly. "Oh," he says heavily. "You aren't one of them."

"What?"

"Nothing, ma'am. Now if you'll excuse me –"

"Wait, hang on –"

"You have a good day now, ma'am."

He disappears into the back room and I stand there, glaring at the door as it swing shut, key still looped around my finger. I have half a mind to vault the desk and head back there and demand to know what the hell he was talking about, but I take a deep breath and let it out. What could he have meant? Maybe he thinks I work over at the Flesh Pit or something, although that wouldn't explain why they only head over after dark...that doesn't make sense. Tourists, maybe? But that doesn't make sense either.

I chew on my lip for a little while and then shake my head, push the door open and let the heat swallow me up again. There's no sense brooding on it; the only thing to do is to move forward.

The drive down to Mystery Flesh Pit is, if it were possible, even hotter and more boring than the drive down to Gumption. The heat is pounding on the window and begging me to let it in and I turn up the AC, trying to drown it out, but it's no use. No matter where I put my arm the sun is pouring down on it, and if I leave it still for more than a moment I get that unpleasant prickling sensation that tells me I'm starting to burn already. I've already got a pretty terrible driver's tan from the ride down but this is just overkill.

No cars pass me on the long dirt road that my phone assures me is the way to Mystery Flesh Pit. It's only wide enough for one so if someone did come by someone's going off the road. Hopefully not me, as this rental Toyota is not built for that sort of thing. It's already been complaining at me creakily and jostling me around. I'll have to get it a car wash or something when I get back to Lubbock, whenever that ends up being. I didn't read over the rental contract very closely but I'm pretty sure if I bring it back this dusty there's some kind of fee.

You can see the outline of the plant, growing larger up ahead. It looks unassuming, exactly like any other indecipherable cluster of industrial buildings you'd see along the side of the highway, all greyish-white, tubes and pipes and tanks and corrugation, warning signs and fences and barbed wire, power lines and scaffolding and light poles, all clustering out of the ground like mushrooms after a cold rain. The guard in the gatehouse is watching me as I pull up, but I turn off the road, turning the car around so I'll be ready to go whenever I need to, well away from the road so anyone trying to get in or out can get by without any trouble.

The sign on the fence broadly proclaims that this is the site of the Permian Basin Recovery and Superorganism Containment Corporation, and says that the administration building is to the right, along with the barracks, infirmary, commissary, and so on.

I get out, shut the car door, take my camcorder with me. I keep it on but held low, taking a shot of my feet. I wander up to the gatehouse and the guard steps out, hand on the butt of his pistol, resting loose but confident. He has an MP helmet on and I wonder whether the National Guard is in charge of security or something, and then I wonder if I'm about to get got for trespassing. Surely there'd be more of a commotion if I was, right?

The guard has a sharp face but disconcertingly watery eyes. "Hi," I tell him.

"This area's off-limits to civilians, ma'am," he tells me.

"I'm not trying to get in," I assure him. "I'm a journalist, I just want to take some photos. Is that okay?"

He relaxes a little, points up and down the fence. "Right now," he says, "you're on public land. You go over that fence, you're trespassing on Federal land. Understand?"

"Yessir," I grunt, reflexively. Some old habits never die.

"You can take photos of whatever you like except for people inside the fence, understand? Before you leave I will check your camera."

"Yessir."

"Any questions?"

"Can I take a photo of you?"

"Am I inside the fence?"

"No."

"Then yes."

I bring my SLR up, snap a picture of him. He gives me a cheesy grin. I look at the display and then back up at him. "You blinked."

"Better take another."

I do so. "You know," I say to him, "this is a much more civil interaction than I expected it to be."

He pauses, halfway back to the guardhouse, to shrug at me. "You're just lucky that the government doesn't also own the land around the park. On most military bases it's like that, you know, they own a hundred-foot radius out from the fence, but here it's different."

"Cause it used to be a national park?"

"I believe so."

"Do I have to stay in your sight or anything?"

He shakes his head. "No, there are cameras. Just make sure you don't touch the fence, it's electric."

I look at the sign on the fence again; I'd sort of skimmed over it before but a few more things catch my eye this time, especially the bright red one proclaiming that it's charged to 10,000 volts. I whistle. "Y'all really don't want people getting in, huh?"

"It's dangerous."

"So I've heard. Want to do an interview?"

"Can't do that, ma'am. What paper are you with?"

"Corpus Christi Star-Tribune."

He raises his eyebrows. "You're a long way from home. What brings you down to Gumption County?"

I briefly explain what got me interested in the Mystery Flesh Pit and he nods. "Lot of people seem to have forgotten about this place. It's for the best, I'd say."

"Care to elaborate?"

"No, ma'am," he says, but not unkindly. "I can't talk to reporters."

"Come on," I wheedle. "Who'd know?"

"We're on camera."

"Fair enough," I shrug.

He gets back in the guardhouse and I run a hand through my hair and turn my attention to the fence. I take a shot of the gates, of the fence, of the signs on the fence, of the great bulging buildings visible through the fence. I get a nice one of the fence extending along into the horizon, a great metal wall bisecting the flat, hot plain of West Texas earth, extending into infinity, it seems, a shimmer of heat distortion bubbling off of it down in the distance. I get another good one of the sun dipping downwards behind the plant, swallowed by it, casting shadows across my face, long spidery ones that scrape the ground. Then, once I'm at about fifty-percent capacity on my memory card, I put the camera away and sit there on the trunk of the car, kicking my heels idly against the gravelly ground, taking it all in. I read the sign again and I call out to the guard. After a moment he comes out of the gatehouse again.

"What is it?" he asks.

"What's that sign mean?" I ask him, pointing to it. He turns, looks at it.

"I don't think it's very ambiguous," he tells me, and I roll my eyes.

"No, I'm serious. What the hell does it mean? 'Over 500 people die each year attempting to commune with the...' what are these symbols?"

"Ma'am, I really can't talk about it."

I look at him carefully but he seems serious, and the sign, well...it's a sign on an electric fence on federal property, so surely it's serious. I turn my camera back on and snap a photo of it, then I realize that there's a bit of background noise, coming slowly closer. It's the rumbling of an engine.

There, down the dirt road, is an unmarked white van. It flashes its brights at me and I step out of the road, let it pass by, while the guard at the gate straightens his uniform. It pulls up to the gate and the guard leans in. He and the driver have a brief conversation before the guard steps back and reaches into the booth to open the gate. The gate opens but the driver of the van sticks his head out, looks back at me. He has a jowly, bristly face, about two five-o'clock shadows away from a beard, and a large bald spot.

"And you, what are you doing here?" he calls, and I get up, a little surprised to be addressed so abruptly. The guard comes out in a hurry, shaking his head.

"Sir," he starts, but the guy in the van isn't having any of it.

"Shut up for a second," he says. "Lady, what're you doing out here?"

"I'm –"

"Sir, you really shouldn't –"

"Look, lady," he says, gesturing me closer. "Things don't have to go this way. There've been a lot of advances with medical technology that can really help you out with those urges. There's –"

"Urges?" I ask. I get a prickly feeling all up and down my spine, like I'm hearing something I ought not to.

"Sir," the guard says, urgently now, "she's a reporter."

The man's mouth snaps shut so quickly he might as well have been a cartoon character. He flushes an angry red and glares at the guard as though he wants to say something but he just ducks his head back through the window of the car and drives through the gate, which closes after him. I shake my head.

"I suppose," I say after a moment, "that you aren't going to tell me what he meant?"

"Not a chance."

"Well," I say, getting up and stretching, "it's been fun."

"You have a good night now."

"Am I going to get a visit from the Men in Black at my hotel room later?"

"I wouldn't worry about that."

"Riiiight." I waggle my eyebrows at him. "That's exactly what they'd want me to think."

He laughs. "Good luck," he tells me.

"I get the feeling I'll need it."

"Yeah," he says after a moment. "Probably."

* * *

I drive home – okay, well, not home, back to Gumption – with the setting sun blazing in my rearview mirror. It slips out of view entirely and coats the sky in dusky purples that quickly fade to black, and then it's the figurative middle of the night. One-handed I manage to wriggle a cigarette out of the pack on the seat next to me and transfer it to my mouth and then feel around for my lighter, and then I groan and pull over. The guy at the rental desk at the airport had seen the pack of cigarettes in my hand while I was filling out the paperwork and told me very strictly that I had better not smoke in the car and I, of course, had managed to forget completely. It's a good thing I remembered before I lit up.

The night is cold but not unbearably so. I spend a long time there, leaning against the trunk of my car, cigarette in my hand but forgotten momentarily, staring up at the sky. There's so little light pollution out here that I can see what feels like all of the stars, practically, great scattered dustings of them sweeping across the whole of the night sky like someone had tossed them there. There's the Big Dipper, there's Orion, there's the Little Dipper... I think that bright one is Mars, maybe, it looks a little reddish. And that cluster there must be the Pleiades.

I take a breath and blow it out and realize exactly how tired I am. It's somewhere lurking in the back of my skull, right behind my eyes, coiled around my neck. If I closed my eyes I'd probably be able to fall asleep out here, right on the hood of the car.

I crack my neck and wince. The moon's bright and full tonight, at least, so I can still see the barren terrain all around me.

I consider the cigarette for a moment before I throw it to the ground and crush it out. I don't normally litter, really, I swear, but the exhaustion creeping over me is making me not care.

There's a long drainage ditch along the side of the road here, terminating in one of those white-concrete tunnels disappearing into the dirt, its mouth wide enough to swallow me whole if I felt like going down there. I stifle a yawn, kick a rock down into the ditch, and traipse around the side of the car, get in and start it up. From where I parked it, the headlights angle downward enough to reveal a sliced-pie cut of the inside of the tunnel and there, inside it, I see for only the briefest second a pale, wide-eyed face staring at me, along with a dark-jacketed body and a hand, curled there on the floor of the tunnel like a spider before, in a flash, the man retreats into the darkness deeper in the tunnel and is gone.

I can feel my heart beating out of my chest and I realize my mouth has dropped open. Real animal fear has seized me and my rational mind cannot jerk back the reins. I put the car into gear, fumbling first and sticking it in neutral, and push the pedal all the way to the floor and roar off into the dark.

I was very lucky that there was no one trying to get to Mystery Flesh Pit that night, for I probably would have flipped the car trying to go around them. The closer I get to Gumption, the slower I drive, until finally I manage to get myself to stop the car just outside of town. I pull over again and get out, curling my lip at my shaking hands, and light up another cigarette.

It was just a homeless guy, hiding in a drainage ditch. I probably spooked the fuck out of him, pulling up right there on top of him and hanging out. He must be wondering what the fuck I'm doing out there. Probably scared him more than he scared me.

Why did I wig out so bad anyway? I like to think I've got a pretty good nerve. Well, stress is a good excuse, I guess. Or perhaps it's because he was simply hiding down there, unknown, unnoticed, the whole time I was sitting there on the hood of the car, completely oblivious. He could have rushed out and attacked me, if he'd had the guts to, and I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

I take another drag at the cigarette and glare up at the stars again. Ursa Major, Orion, Pleiades. Sometimes, when it's quiet like this, I allow myself to think about what the coming year, or possibly years, if I'm lucky, will be like.

Whatever.

I crush the cigarette out and drive back into town, head back to my motel room. I feel better once I've showered and put on some shorts. I get into bed and pull the covers up, and even though they're the scratchy, weird-feeling covers used in seemingly every cheap motel in America, regardless of location, I can feel myself drifting off to sleep easily enough.


	2. Chapter 2

At first I don't know what woke me, but then I feel buzzing by my thigh and I reach down without thinking and grab my phone, bring it to my ear. "Hello?" I say, feeling horribly groggy.

"Hi, Roan, honey."

"Dad?" I ask, sitting up straighter. I squint at the clock on the bedside table. Oh. It's not actually as late as I thought it was, only one in the morning. I yawn and crack my jaw accidentally. "Ouch."

"Are you okay? Is this a bad time?"

"No, no, I'm fine. What's up? Isn't it late there?"

"It's only two in the morning. Your mother and I just got finished watching a season of West Wing and I thought I'd call you, see how you're doing."

"West Wing is still going?"

"No, no, it's just the latest show we're watching. We just got through with season three. How are you, honey?"

"I'm good."

There's a brief pause.

"Yeah, you're good? I'm glad, I'm glad to hear that. We, ah, we think about you pretty often."

"Yeah, I think about you guys too. How's mom doing?"

"She's good, she's good. She got through with that last operation and, you know, she was really out of it for, ah, for a couple of weeks, but she's all rested up now and she's – she's doing a lot better."

"That's great, I'm glad."

I get up, slip on some sandals, and push the door open, making sure I've tucked the room key into my pocket, and let the night air swallow me up. I lean on the second-floor railing just outside my room and look up and down the row of rooms; ordinarily you'd expect to see at least one or two chain-smoking Latinos out there burning the midnight oil, at least judging by my experiences with similar motels in the past, but it's completely deserted, just like the rest of Gumption.

"What are you up to these days? Are you still working for that paper down in Corpus Christi?"

"Yeah, the Star-Tribune."

"How's that going?"

"It's good."

"Yeah? That's good, that's good."

Another silence passes. I close my eyes. "How about you?" I ask. "How's summer school going?"

"Oh, it's fine. Some of these kids are alright. I just wish it wasn't so hot."

"You and everybody else."

"Right," he laughs. "So yeah, that's alright. I think this is going to be my last year doing it, though, when they ask me next year I'm going to say no."

"This is, what, the fourth year in a row you've said that?"

"Oh, shut up," he laughs. "And then in a couple of months I'll have the AP exam conference in Louisville, I'm going as a reader again."

"I keep asking you to get me one of those little bats and you never do."

"Well, I have five of them sitting in my closet back home, if you'd come and visit once in a while you'd get them."

This conversation, as it usually does, is steering in a direction I don't much like the conclusion of. "Well," I say briskly, "I'm glad mom's doing okay. And you seem to be doing alright as well."

"I wish you'd call more."

"Well, you know, I'm busy."

"Too busy to call your parents?" he asks, and I roll my eyes.

"Well, you know," I start, but he sighs heavily.

"Forget it," he says. "I just wish you'd talk to us more."

I think, not for the first time, of the letter laying on the floor of my apartment, five hundred or so miles away. I lick my lips and try to ignore the cold drip of apprehension at the pit of my stomach. "Dad, I –" I start, and then I trail off.

There, below me and just barely out of reach of the tall streetlights, someone is walking purposefully into the desert, headed straight for the far-off smudge on the horizon that marks the Mystery Flesh Pit.

"Roan, I think we lost connection. Roan? Can you hear me?"

I hang up the call. I spend only a moment thinking before I hustle down the stairs and, quickly thumbing the phone to silent, head into the desert as well, my eyes glued to the bobbing pinprick of a flashlight there in the desert ahead of me.

I made the decision before I had a chance to rationalize it and talk myself out of it. I have my phone, I guess, so I'll be able to record audio, but the camcorder is still in my room, as is my good voice recorder. Keeping an eye on the light ahead of me I sneak the top of my phone out of my pocket and look at the battery; somewhere close to sixty percent, and I know the voice-recording app that I use eats the hell out of the battery, so I probably won't get more than thirty minutes of audio out of it.

I'm not dressed properly at all and while it isn't unbearably cold I know it's going to get to me after a while. I kick myself inwardly but I'm already about a half-mile out of town, and maybe a half-mile behind the guy, so there's no point to me turning back now. I stamp down the rising head of fear in my stomach – what if I step on a scorpion and it stings me? What if I run into that homeless guy from the drainage ditch and he rapes me?

That last one, at least, I think ironically to itself, would have its own form of justice to it.

Whoever this guy is, he isn't making any effort to hide his movements. Although it isn't quite sandy enough for me to be able to just follow his tracks, he isn't getting down to prevent himself from silhouetting starkly against the starry backdrop of the West Texas hills, and he isn't, as best as I can tell, checking to see if he's being followed. At least, the flashlight he's holding never swings around to point towards me, although I think I'm far enough away from him that he wouldn't be able to see me even if he did look back.

The walk turns into a trudge. It's a long way to the Mystery Flesh Pit; not an impossible walk, but long. I keep losing my footing and tripping over myself and more and more this seems to be turning into a bad idea. How am I going to find my way back? I turn and look behind me, hoping to see Gumption in the distance, but if it's visible it's behind one of the slumping hills we crossed about twenty minutes ago. I want to rest but clearly this guy isn't quite as tired as I am, despite it being...two in the morning already. Christ.

At least I have all day to try and track down the librarian's brother. I'll be able to sleep in, maybe take a bubble bath...assuming I make it back to the hotel safely.

Ahead of me the guy clicks off his light and I freeze; for a moment I think he's spotted me but once I squint I can make out that he's still moving ahead, just without the light now. Before I can wonder why that is, exactly, I realize that ahead of both of us, partially masked by the nearest hill, there's another, brighter light. I drop to my stomach as it turns and points in my direction, and I see the man I've been following hold up a hesitant hand in greeting.

I pull myself forward and up onto a sort of berm and see a small gathering of people, five in total, all centered around one man, holding a much more powerful flashlight than the man I'd been following had, one of those low-slung heavy-duty jobs. I squint harder, trying to will my eyes to work like binoculars.

The guy in the middle is talking, looking between the four others. From this angle their faces are shrouded in darkness, I can't make them out at all, but there's something familiar about him. I wonder if I've seen him in town somewhere, if I've walked past him on the street...

Oh. Of course.

The face I'm staring at clicks into place and I realize (although a tiny, rational part of my brain, the same part that screamed at me not to follow someone out into the desert wearing shorts and sandals in the middle of the night, the same part that told me that I'd either die of cold or I'd get stabbed for interrupting someone's drug deal, mutters quietly to itself that I can't be sure) that the man in the center of the circle, looking around at the others seriously, like a leader, is the hobo I saw hiding in the drainage ditch on the way back from the Mystery Flesh Pit.

They're moving now, the light clicked off, all of them ducked down into a low crouch, the man who I'd thought was a hobo leading the way. I can't tell which of them is the man I'd followed now, they distance and the darkness has made them all too uniform for such distinctions.

We crest two hills like this, them leading, cautiously, stopping when the man in front raises his hand and going when he puts it back down again, myself trailing along behind, half-bent and cautious, before we slip over a third hill and I flatten down again, for there, ahead of us, is the tall, electrified fence surrounding the remains of the Mystery Flesh Pit.

There are fewer lights than I would have expected. They're dotted every hundred yards or so, tall imposing fixtures that provide wells of pallid, fluorescent light but leave great blistering swaths of darkness between. There's no trail or road alongside the outside of the fence, but I think I can make out one on the inside, wide enough for two cars abreast, perhaps. It seems utterly deserted. I wonder if I ought to have covered my face, to try and baffle any cameras there might be, but the group ahead of me doesn't seem to be concerned about that either, so I put it aside.

We've come at the fence at an oblique angle, far away from the main gate, which I can just barely see in the distance, well-lit and secure-looking.

Between the moonlight and the lamps I should be able to tell what the group does from this hill. I sit down, dangle my legs over the side before drawing them in beneath me Indian-style; it's too cold for anything else. At least I have my sweater that I'd slipped on before taking that phone call from my dad outside, but my legs are freezing.

The group ahead of me hustles over to the fence, to a small boulder nearly resting against it, and the man in the lead sets the unlit black box of the flashlight down on the ground and rolls up his sleeves and then picks up the boulder and sets it aside. I blink at that but then I realize as it falls over and he reaches down to steady it that it's hollow, like one of those fake boulders they sell at Home Depot to put over utility meters and pipes and stuff in your lawn. Beneath it is...

I again feel that same prickly feeling working its way up my spine. I can feel my mouth drop open loosely.

Beneath it is a dark, yawning mouth of a tunnel, large enough, perhaps, for an average-sized man if he were to drop on his belly and crawl through it. The leader of the group turns to the others and gestures, saying something to them. He seems to be describing a long, crescent arc, and then he points downwards, and the others nods. He pats one of them on the back and stands up, away from the tunnel, and then, one after the other, the rest of them crawl through. When the last one is through, he puts the rock back, picks up the flashlight, and hurries away from the fence, heading straight towards me.

"Damn," I growl under my breath, looking around for a place to hide. There's a bush off to the left that might conceal me if I get behind it quick enough...

I scurry backwards as quickly as I dare while he walks towards the incline of the hill, still looking off towards the main gates, and then once I've put the lip of the hill between him and me, I roll onto my hands and knees and clamber behind the bush. Fifteen seconds later, as well as roughly thirty of my rushing heartbeats, he gets on top of the hill. He looks round, seemingly noticing nothing amiss, and sits down on a large boulder. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes, draws one out and sticks it in his mouth, then reaches into his jacket for a lighter. He flicks it a couple of times before it lights and then he puffs, blows the smoke out. He lets out a big sigh, still looking back at the fence, and then turns to look straight at me. I freeze.

He leans forward, shakes another cigarette out of the packet, and holds it out to me. "Want one?" he asks.

* * *

"So how long did you know I was following you?" I ask. I take another puff of the cigarette and hold it, then let it out. He shrugs.

"I noticed one of my...guests had a tail, but I paid attention to you and you didn't act like a cop."

"I'm not a cop."

"I know."

He has a low, gravelly voice, but it has a mellowness to it that doesn't make it quite so unpleasant to listen to. He glances over at me every now and then but for the most part keeps his eyes glued to the fence, to the buildings beyond, to the vast expanse of desert within the fence beyond the buildings. He looks over at me.

"Why're you here?" he asks, and I shrug.

"I got curious."

"Where're you from?"

"Corpus Christi."

"Long way to go on a whim."

"I –" I start, and then stop, shrug at him again. "It didn't feel like it was real," I say, going through it slowly in my head. I'd never really stopped to analyze my own actions. "I had never, ever heard of this place before, and I grew up here. Not here here but in Texas. I thought it was a hoax or something but the more research I did the more I couldn't deny that there was something here."

"So you flew all the way out here to look at the fence and then go back?"

I look at him, wondering if he's getting at something. "I guess," I say after a moment. "I was thinking that maybe there'd be something here I could do a story on but it seems like all of this is ancient history now."

He laughs. "For some people it is. For others it isn't."

I look at him. "Why are you smuggling people inside the fence?"

He's silent for a moment. When he answers me it's with a question. "When you were doing all your research," he asks, "did you come across a recording of the news that day?"

"Yeah," I say, remembering it. "It was CNN, I think."

"What did you see?"

"Well...I saw a pit, full of blood, and all of the emergency vehicles, and –"

"Was it daytime?"

"Uh. Yeah, it was. Why?"

He looks at me significantly. "The disaster happened a little after midnight on the fourth."

I frown. "Wait..."

"That's right, work it out."

"Why wasn't there video of it that night?"

"Oh, there was. But it was never broadcast. Same as all the photographs journalists took that night, those were never published."

"What? Why?"

"Because of two things – first, the disaster was horribly mismanaged, and a lot of people died or got hurt who didn't need to, and secondly, because of something that happened later on, after everything was calming down."

"Which was?"

He licks his lips and looks at me. "You're a reporter, aren't you?" he asks, and I nod.

"How could you tell?"

"Only type of person I figure would do what you did, follow one of...my guests out here and meet me and not call the cops or the FBI on us. You're curious."

"I'm very curious."

"That and you said you wanted to do a story on it."

"Oh. Right."

"Why?" he asks, turning to face me directly. "You could just drop this and let it go. You weren't there, you don't have any connection to this place," he says, gesturing behind himself. "Least I don't figure you do."

"You're right, I don't."

"So why? Why bother?"

"I just found it fascinating. I wanted to learn more about it the moment I heard of it." I briefly relate the story of being stuck in the traffic jam and what lead me to make my way down to Gumption, and he shakes his head.

"I'll only tell you this once," he says. "You'd better get out of here."

"Is that a threat?"

"Not from me. But if you stick around you aren't going to like what you find."

I take a deep breath, let it out. I feel very calm, like a still lake is inside of me, untroubled by ripples. "Tell me what happened on the night of the disaster."

He shrugs. "About forty people who'd been injured and put in a field hospital right on the edge of the pit, after everything had died down, got up and walked to the pit, got down to the orifice, and threw themselves in."

"What?"

"Just what I said. I don't suppose you found that fact in any of the research you did, huh?"

"No," I shake my head. "No, I didn't. But why, why did they –"

"I was there," he says softly. "I was in one of those hospitals and I watched the woman in the bed next to mine get up, even though she had an acid burn all down her leg that would have made it impossible to stand without excruciating pain, and walk out the hospital. I couldn't move, they had me in a cast rigged up to the bedframe, I'd broken my leg getting out of the pit."

"Did she say anything?"

"Didn't say a damn thing, didn't even look at me. She was walking like she was in a dream."

"What do you mean?"

"Like she didn't think any of this was real," he says. "Like all she could see was the pit."

"Why did she do it? Do you know?"

"She felt it calling to her."

"Is that what that sign's about, over there by the gate?" I ask. He nods.

"Yeah. Used to be a lot of people would wander up, try and get in. That's why it's an electric fence now."

"How widespread is this?"

"Depends on how you look at it. Not very many people know about it. They took it off of the incident report that was released to the public, the news was censored so there wasn't any mention of it, Google has an algorithm that make sure sites about it don't get indexed."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?"

"Cause people would get scared," I mutter, more to myself than to him. "We like to think that we're special, that we aren't animals, but something that can manipulate our minds..."

"Exactly. So they bury it."

"But if this many people go missing –"

"I don't think it affects everybody in the same way, or at all. The more sensitive you are, the more emotional, creative, and intelligent you are, the harder it hits you. But it might just be an obsession for a few months before it fades, or it might turn into a pathology, and those are the people who either can't take it any more and kill themselves, or they make their way here."

"And you let them inside the fence."

"Yeah."

"What happens to them, in there?" I ask, jerking my chin towards the Pit. He shrugs.

"One of two things. Either the guards catch them, in which case I don't know what happens to them, or they make it to the Pit."

"And?"

"And if they make it to the Pit, they either chicken out, if it isn't such a severe case that they literally can't any more, or they throw themselves in."

"And you help them do this?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because if it's at that point, either way it'll be a mercy to them."

"What? How do you know?"

"I used to be one of them."

"What?" I say again. "I can't believe this story you're telling me, it's macabre."

"It's the truth. You're writing a story on this? Gonna put it in the paper?"

"I don't know," I tell him. "I thought I might but the more I learn the more I think I won't."

"Good," he nods. "They'll get you if you do. Bad idea."

"They?"

"You know. They. Capital T."

"The Powers that Be."

"Sure."

"So you help people kill themselves?" I ask. He doesn't look so threatening, now that I've been talking to him for fifteen minutes or so, but he's still a man and I'm a woman, he's still stronger than me just intrinsically. Stupid, stupid Roan, not taking any sort of weapon with her...not that I have one to rely on to begin with.

"It's more complicated than that."

"So it's about money?"

"Hell no. I don't take a dime from 'em."

"So tell me."

"This is your last chance to get out. You can go home, you aren't tangled in this yet."

"I'm not going anywhere."

He smiles then, and I smile back, I can't help it. There's a grinding sound, over beyond the fence, and we both look over; a Humvee is driving past, floodlight swinging back and forth along the fence. He nods. "That's the patrol. That means at least one of them made it to the Pit."

"They don't have regular patrols?"

"If you only knew what budget cuts have done to that place. See that fence? Ten thousand volts? They don't even power it any more. Too expensive. They leave all the signs up to try and dissuade people but it never works. All those cameras? Most of 'em are broken, or fake, I can't tell which. Too expensive. They're running on fumes in there. There's no research any more, no search for a permanent solution, they just keep the plant running to keep the thing asleep and keep taking the ballast out."

"Ballast?"

He shakes his head. "It ain't safe out here. We'll talk tomorrow, alright?"

I nod. "Okay. How will I - ?"

"My name's Peter. I work at the 7-11 in town, come by after four, it's dead all night, guarantee it. We can talk about whatever you want. There'll – why're you looking at me like that?"

"You're Peter?"

He looks at me carefully. "Yeah," he says after a moment. "How'd you hear of me?"

I debate, briefly, whether or not to tell him, then shrug. "I ran into your sister in the Lubbock public library, when I was looking through old newspapers for stories on the Pit," I tell him. In the dark I can't tell his reaction. "She told me to come and find you."

He sits in silence for a moment that stretches longer and longer until it seems ready to snap. "She did, huh," he says, not really a question. He blows out a breath, then gets up, starts to walk back towards town. "Come on," he says, turning back around when I don't move. "It isn't safe out here this late," he repeats. "I'll guide you back to town."

"She's sorry," I tell him.

"She told you to tell me that?"

"More or less."

"More or less?"

"She told me that if I mentioned she'd sent me looking for you you probably wouldn't tell me anything."

He laughs at that, long and mirthless. "Yeah, that's my sister," he says. "Come on."

The walk back to town is long and cold and surprisingly scary, considering we heard what we both thought was a cougar (mountain lion, catamount, puma, painter, shadow cat, panther...) off in the distance and we both froze. I felt myself huddling closer to Peter, grievously aware of the goosebumps pebbling my legs and arms. We looked at each other for a moment then said nothing. I hoped he wouldn't get the wrong idea.

I tried to say something to him when we got back to the motel but he just looked at me and nodded and walked off. I realized I didn't know what I was going to say anyway. Eventually I called after him.

"Hey, what time tomorrow?"

He turned around, still walking, and shrugged. "After five," he called back.

"You want me to bring anything for you?"

He frowned. "Like what?"

"I don't know, dinner?"

In my experience these sort of people don't mind being blatantly bribed for a story, especially if it's something simple. He laughed.

"Sure."

"What do you like?"

"Don't care," he said, turning back around, waving his hand in a noncommittal way.

I watched him go, and then I turned and went up the stairs and got into my room. I stood there for a moment staring at myself in the mirror and then I flopped down on the bed without bothering to take my clothes off and I fell asleep so quickly I don't remember doing it.


	3. Chapter 3

When I wake up it's blazingly bright outside and I feel like death. It takes me a couple of moments to realize that my phone is ringing and without looking I reach for it, feel on the side for the power button, flip it around so it's right side up and then swipe to answer it. "Hello?" I croak and I almost laugh at myself, at how awful I sound. Whoever's on the line is going to think I'm super hungover. That'd be my assumption at least, I –

"Miss Dzilenski, where are you?"

Shit.

"Hi, Jim," I tell my editor. I hear him sigh.

"It's two in the afternoon, Roan," he starts. That gets me to perk my ears up.

"Is it? Fuck."

"Roan –"

"God," I groan, rolling over. I bump my foot on something. "Ow."

"Where are you?"

I think about lying for a moment then decide against it. "I'm in Gumption," I tell him, and at least it makes him shut up for a second.

"What the hell are you doing in Gumption? Did I tell you to go to Gumption?"

I hold the phone a little away from my ear. "Alright, Jim," I tell him. "You can drop the J. Jonah Jameson act, I get it."

"Did you at least send in that piece on the water plant downtown? I have that slated for –"

"I haven't even worked on it."

I can hear his blood pressure rising from over the phone. He's going to start making a little whistling sound soon. "Alright. I've given you too many second chances as it is," he tells me. "If you aren't going to take this job seriously and at least show up on time and pretend to work on what you're supposed to, you can go work somewhere else."

"Okay."

"And don't even think about giving my name as a reference – wait, what?"

"I said okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay as in I quit, Jim," I tell him. I can feel myself getting mad but I stuff it back down.

And then, like he always does, he calms himself down. "Roan," he says. I can hear him turning around in his office chair, hunching down so he can feel conspiratorial. There's a lump building in my throat but I ignore it. "What's going on? Are you okay? Are you –"

There's no good way to put it. Fuck it. "I have HIV, Jim."

His reaction is amusing. Shock first, then sympathy, then rationalizing. "Oh fuck, Roan," he says, "I'm so sorry. Are you doing okay? Do you need any – wait a minute."

"What?"

"Roan, you haven't, I don't know, given up, have you? HIV isn't a death sentence any more, it's not the 80s, there are drugs –"

I can't help it, I laugh. I imagine I must sound pretty insane over the phone to him but it just bursts out of me and then comes pouring out until I'm done. He tries to talk, to get me to stop, but I can't, I can't stop myself.

"Roan," he says finally, when I'm done and I'm taking little gasping breaths that turn into sobs and I feel the tears roiling in my eyes and I ball my fist and hit myself hard in the thigh, cause I'd promised, I'd promised myself I wouldn't cry, goddam it – "Roan," he says, "what is it? You don't have AIDS, you're okay. You have insurance, we can figure something out."

"You don't – you don't understand," I tell him. "You remember that time six months ago when I had to go to the hospital?"

"Yeah," he says, confused, "but you were okay, you got a clean bill of health."

"It was a viral infection," I tell him. "And they gave me an antiviral drug to try and treat it, the same one you use to control HIV. Or no, not an antiviral, an antiretroviral, whatever the hell the difference is. Makes the virus inactive but doesn't kill it, because that was too dangerous or something. Fuck I wish I'd paid more attention when the doctor was explaining it to me."

"And?" he asks. He's getting impatient. Why shouldn't he be? I've held up his day – hell, his life enough with my bullshit.

"And I went into anaphylactic shock," I tell him. "I'm allergic to it. They had to give me epinephrine and adrenaline and all that shit. It was a near thing. I never told anybody cause I didn't want you guys to worry. But then I started worrying, so I went to the doctor and got myself tested, you know, just in case..."

I can hear him processing that for a moment. "Oh, shit," he says finally.

"Yeah," I say. I wipe my eyes. "So you're wrong," I tell him, "it's a death sentence for me."

"There has to be something –"

"There's not. I got the results back on Thursday. Positive."

"I knew something was wrong, you were acting so differently on Friday. Who'd you get it from? Did you tell –"

"You know who I got it from. And yeah, I called already. Don't worry about it."

"Wait, what are you doing in Gumption, anyway? That's..." I hear him clicking around. "Almost five hundred miles away. What, did you take a plane?"

"Yeah, caught one on Friday."

"Why?"

"I'm investigating. I've got a story."

"Roan," he starts. Something in his tone presses on a weak spot somewhere deep inside of me that has been bending and bending and snaps it.

"Fuck," I growl. He starts to say something then stops. I throw the phone onto the bed. "Fuck!" I scream. I want to break something, I want to punch someone. I look at the mirror on the wall and think about it and then scream again, a pathetic, wordless cry of rage. Then I see myself and I stop. I meet my reflection's gaze and then look away. Jim is saying something from the bed but I don't care. The anger is slipping out of me.

I look down at my hands and they're shaking. I let my lip curl, then I go back to the bed and pick up the phone again. "Hi," I say after a moment, not thinking of anything better.

"Needed that?" he asks.

"Yeah," I breathe.

"You should come back. We'll figure this out. There's plenty we'll be able to work out."

"No," I tell him. I don't actually think about it at all, I just say it. Zero conscious effort.

"No?" he asks, sounding genuinely confused. "Roan, why the hell not?"

"I'm working on a story," I tell him again.

"What the hell kind of story? If you're in Gumption it's got to be about Mystery Flesh Pit, right?"

"You've heard of it?"

"Of course I've heard of it. Me and my ex-wife went there on our honeymoon. Nice place but a little creepy. Ancient history now, though."

"Oh," I say, feeling a little disappointed. "I'd only just heard of it."

"Roan," he says again, in that gentle little voice that I hate so much, "just come back. Do you need money for a plane ticket? I can –"

"Fuck," I mutter again.

"What is it?"

"Forget it, Jim. Forget I called, forget I said anything, forget I fucking worked at the paper," I tell him. "I get up every day and I don't do anything meaningful, I'm twenty-six years old and everybody has always told me how much potential I have, how lucky I am that I graduated from a good school and got a job doing something I love and now, now that I know I'm going to die –"

"You were always going to die," he points out.

"Shut the fuck up!" I hiss. "Now that I know I'm going to die, it means nothing, it doesn't matter, I'm nobody, I've done nothing, nothing I do from now on will ever be enough to mean anything."

"That isn't true."

"Yeah, it is. What have I done that's made a lasting impression on – on anything?"

Jim is silent for a moment. I hear him take a breath and blow it out. "When I got divorced," he says finally, "you were the only person at the paper who noticed anything was wrong, and when you followed me when I got off of work that day, you saved my life."

I laugh, then let it trail off when he doesn't join in. "You're serious, aren't you," I say.

"Yeah," he grunts. "I was going back home and I was probably going to drink a lot more than I should have, and, you know, getting drunk won't make you happier, it won't change how you feel, it just amplifies it. And I felt like shit. And if I went home by myself I would have just kept drinking and then I really think I would have shot myself. But you made me go to a bar with you and you cut me off after a while and when I got home things didn't seem quite so bad."

I start to say something, then stop myself.

"Anyway," he says, a hint of his usual gruffness creeping back into his voice, "you've made an impact in my life, at least."

"That's why you've given me all those second chances, isn't it?" I ask him. He laughs.

"Yeah," he says. "And because, you know...you aren't actually that much of a burden."

I snort. "Yeah," I say, "right."

"I'm serious."

"Jim, I'm gonna go."

"Come back. We'll sort this."

"Let me do what I have to."

"What do you have to do?" he barks. "Do you even know? Are you just saying that to get me off your back?"

I actually do laugh at that one. "Yeah," I tell him. "Yeah, I am."

"Alright, well...I want to at least see you before you die, if that's what you're so fucking convinced is your unchangeable future."

"You're not treating the invalid very kindly."

"Shut up. I'm giving you a week off, do with it what you will. Tracy and Mike will pick up your column, so don't worry about it."

"You already asked them?"

"I'm the boss, I don't have to ask them. Get your head screwed on straight. Call me as soon as you're back in town."

"Okay, dad."

"Shut up. Take care of yourself."

I'm smiling, even though I don't want to be. "Yeah, alright. You too, okay?"

"Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about me. Call if you need anything."

"Thanks." I wait for a moment, then shrug to myself. "I'm sorry I probably fucked up your deadlines for today."

"Don't even worry about it," he tells me. I can practically see him waving his hand magnanimously. "It's not like anybody reads the paper any more anyway."

"See you."

"Take care."

Click and a dial tone. I get up from the bed and stretch, then get naked. I turn the shower on cold and light a cigarette, watch the smoke spiral up into the fan vent on the ceiling. When it gets wet I light another, and then another.

* * *

"You know," Peter says, glancing up at me, "I really didn't think you were actually going to bring dinner."

"What, you thought I'd forget?" I ask him, leaning forward and snatching a fry from the pile next to his elbow. He glares at me and shields them with his hands.

"I said you could have one fry."

"I bought the food, I get as many fries as I want."

"You bought it for me."

"Yeah, you're just borrowing it."

"This is loaned food? When do you want it back?"

He starts making retching noises at me and I cover my ears, make a face at him. "Stop it or I really will throw up," I tell him, "and then you'll have to clean it."

The 7-11 is as empty as Peter had promised, so empty that he's the only employee in the store. I can't stop looking at him and shaking my head in bewilderment and after a while he makes a face at me and asks what my problem is.

"I just still can't quite believe it," I explain, sneaking another fry.

"You could have gotten your own fries."

"When it's during the daytime," I say, ignoring him, taking another drink from my ridiculously large cup of Sprite, "none of this seems like it's real. Like, I look at you and I don't see the same guy I was talking to last night at three in the morning. It all seemed so serious then but now it's like, I don't know. Life goes on."

"Everything that's there in the dark is still there in the light."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for dinner, by the way."

"I figured you might want a break from 7-11 food."

"First rule of working at a place that serves food," he tells me, grinning slightly. "Don't eat the food."

I laugh at that one. "Alright, fair point."

"I get what you mean," he says after a moment, "about it not feeling real."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. It's been a long time since I've, you know, actually been down there. Sometimes I forget what it's – what it's really like."

I reach down into my bag and take out the voice recorder, place it on the counter. He stares at it. "I won't record if you don't want me to," I say gently. His eyes flick up to mine.

"You realize," he says after a moment, "that whatever I tell you, if you ever publish it, if you ever put it out there – they'll get you for it."

"I'm willing to take that risk."

"I mean it. When you were doing your research, did you see any accounts by survivors? By rangers and park staff? Of the disaster, I mean."

"A couple," I say. "But they were..."

"Yes?"

"Unsatisfying," I finish, shrugging. He laughs.

"Unsatisfying. That's a word for it."

"Are you suggesting they were paid off?" I ask, clicking the voice recorder on. He looks at the tiny blinking red light, then back at me.

"Paid off, scared into silence, threatened, I don't know. Maybe a combination of the three."

"How do you know?"

"They did it with everybody. They did it with me; every ranger I know of got offered a very nice pension if they signed an NDA that had some...unusual stipulations in it."

"Like what?"

"It was just...very specific. Very far-reaching. And as far as I'm aware most NDAs out there don't make any vague threats to your friends or family."

"Are you serious?"

"Lady," he says, spreading his arms, giving me a disbelieving little smile, "after everything you've seen, you think I'm making any of this up?"

"I'm just trying to – I'm sorry, I don't want to imply that I don't believe you, it's just that, you know..."

"It's a little extreme. Yeah, I know."

"Did you sign it?"

"Didn't really give me a choice."

"I'm pretty sure that's illegal."

"Well, I mean, they gave me a choice – either sign it and get some hush money and live a nice, peaceful, quiet life, or don't sign it and live with the paranoia. There are a couple of online forum type sites for ex-rangers and park staff that I used to frequent and one of the guys there, someone I knew, actually, he didn't sign it."

"And?"

"You ever heard of gangstalking?"

"I haven't."

He reaches up, massages his chin through his beard. A nervous tic or something. Outside on the road a car trundles past and we both watch it go by. "The thing about it was, it would have been hard to prove that it was something organized. He started posting in kind of a diary format, every day at around seven or eight in the evening. He lived in, uh, I think Missouri, one of those states, so it was a way different climate but the same time zone. He said that he'd see people watching him, different people every time, although after a while he thought it might have been the same group of eight or so people wearing different outfits, wigs, things like that. He'd notice them staring at him if he turned around quickly, or he'd see a strange car he'd never seen before parked opposite his house."

"How credible was he?"

"When I worked with him I'd have trusted anything he told me."

"And afterwards?"

"How do you mean?"

"You said 'when you worked with him.' Does that mean you wouldn't have trusted him once you weren't working together any more?"

"I think that something must have been going on. I don't know for sure. He got erratic very quickly once he started posting about it, he wasn't getting enough sleep, he'd see ghosts everywhere."

"Sounds like he was paranoid."

"Paranoia's only paranoia if it's unfounded."

"How does that story end?"

"Two weeks after, he got hit by a car. Died on the way to the hospital."

"Could have been a coincidence."

"You're supposed to think that."

I blow a breath out. His eyes flash.

"I told you you'd regret staying," he tells me, and I roll my eyes at him.

"In for a penny, in for a pound," I assure him. "And even if I can't use this in a story," I say, tapping the recorder, "who knows what the climate will be like in ten years? In twenty?"

"You're going to sit on it for that long?"

"Well, I –" I start, and then stop. He looks at me strangely. Of course I was going to say something like 'well, I won't but whoever I give my data to might' but I don't want to open up another can of worms. "I don't know," I finish, lamely, and we both know I'm lying, but he doesn't press me.

Peter looks like he's in his early to mid thirties but I haven't asked him his age. We've kept things pleasantly anonymous so far, which we both seemed to agree was the best way to do things. I don't know his family name; he doesn't know my name at all.

I can tell from the way he looks at me that he still thinks I don't know what I'm getting myself into. Sure, he might have a point, but I think I've at least demonstrated my resolve by now.

"Look, whatever," he says, taking another bite of the hamburger I got him. He wipes his upper lip with his thumb, still holding the burger. "I just want to make sure you know what you're getting into."

"I know."

"So what do you want to know?" he asks me. "Where do you want to start?"

"Start at the beginning," I suggest. So he does.

* * *

Peter got hired at the Mystery Flesh Pit in the middle of 1999, right after several other rangers had quit and they were offering incentives for transfers from other parks. Previously he'd been working with the Outward Bound group in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, where he'd gone to school, and although the hiring call was mainly interested in other, experienced rangers, Peter caught their attention because he'd been present as an assistant guide when a previous Outward Bound group went through the Mystery Flesh Pit, with special permission from the head ranger, a rather historic first for both organizations. Prior to this, the largest expedition groups that had gone through the Mystery Flesh Pit together were some of the initial mining teams that explored it back in the 70s.

The Outward Bound excursion had gone relatively uneventfully, with the exception of one cell of the 20-strong group picking a bad place to camp one night and nearly drowning inside their tents when a flood of gastric juices submerged them and began leaking in through a patch in the side of the tent that later proved to have been made using thread that wasn't acid-resistant. Although the three boys and the one counselor inside the tent weren't killed, they suffered acid burns on close to seventy percent of their bodies that required emergency evacuation to the medical center in the Lower Visitor Center, which, Peter explained, was a relatively rare occurrence. From there, the four injured members of the group were taken to the local hospital and treated, while the rest of the group continued on their excursion without any further issues. Peter had been one of the first members of the group to respond to the calls for help from the trapped cell, and had cut the tent open and assisted the guide ranger present in lifting the four people inside to safety, and it was this connection, and more specifically, this immediate willingness to put himself in harm's way to save others, that Peter claimed was the deciding factor in his application.

Although he started out with fairly mundane work at the Flesh Pit, leading tour groups and manning desks in the Visitor Center, specifically, his skill with bushcraft – or whatever the hell the word ought to be for the Pit - lead to a rapid series of promotions until he was one of a tight-knit crew of patrol rangers who would venture far beyond the relative safety of the lighted and fenced walking trails to respond to calls of distress, reports of animal or fungal activity, and in a few rare cases, fugitives reported to be hiding somewhere within the pit. Like most National Parks, Peter explained, Mystery Flesh Pit was big, and the sheer scale of it wasn't obvious until you'd been down inside of it, due to the majority of it being covered by the earth, and the top-side area of the park being relatively small compared to the underground bulk of it. Just like other National Parks, it was a vast area of relatively undisturbed and unobserved wilderness, which meant that, for criminals with strong stomachs, it was a good place to hide out. Although, he admitted, they retrieved far more of these criminals dead than alive.

"What are the main hazards, down there in the Pit?" I asked him, and he shook his head and blew his breath out, then started to count on his fingers. One, dehydration, since the air in there is thick and humid and will leach the moisture out of you if you aren't wearing a closed-circuit suit. Two, digestion, since it's incredibly easy to slip and fall into one of the numerous sacs, gullets, craws, or other redundant and often inexplicable digestive organs dotted throughout the pit, and although a ranger suit is acid-resistant it isn't acid-proof. If you're quick enough you might be able to piton your way out before you and everything on you becomes far too slippery for use, and then if that happens you'd better radio for help and pray someone gets to you fast. Double this risk if you're exploring somewhere there aren't maps, or where the maps are outdated. Most of the organs, he said, close to the Visitor Center, for perhaps a five-mile radius, are marked and blocked off, but those coverings can be damaged, or new ones can grow, given enough time. And if you go beyond that...

"There be monsters," I suggested.

He laughed. "That's number three," he told me. For the Pit is home to a vast menagerie of extremely strange creatures, invertebrate and vertebrate alike, which can be found in no other place. He tells me about things like the abyssal copepod, a gigantic crustacean roughly the size of an elephant, which can be found slithering and scraping in the deepest recesses of the pit, some ancient off-shoot of the ordinary ocean-going copepod line, which ordinarily is so small that it can't be seen with the naked eye. He lists off a dozen creatures with strange, suggestive names that call fantastic images and assumptions to my mind, things like a venous shamble, a ballast siren, a cloistropod, an amorphous shame. Some of these, like the copepods and the macrobacteria, I'd read of on Wikipedia, when I'd done my initial research on the Pit, but others are alien to me.

Most of these things, he tells me, although relatively large – pit gigantism was a well-studied and observed phenomenon – were shy, retiring creatures, opportunistic feeders and scavengers, preying on terrene wildlife unfortunate enough to stumble into the pit. Although, he corrects himself, some are helped to stumble. I frown at that and ask him what he means, and he tells me that some of the larger creatures migrate through the pit in cycles related to breeding or to the phase of the moon, although how they can possibly tell what phase the moon is in from down in the Pit's guts, he can't say. And some of the larger, more aggressive ones, the copepods and the shambles and something that he refers to only as a 'leechman' (and waves away my question as to what the hell a leechman might be), they do sometimes venture up to the surface and pull things in.

I sit there and process that for a while and then ask the obvious question: "But why the hell did you let them? There's only the one entrance to the pit and there are so many eyes on it..." I started, and then trailed off, for the obvious answer occurred to me, and he saw the look on my face and nodded.

"What I'm about to tell you," he said to me, "you cannot tell anyone. They will come down on you so hard it will be as though you've never existed."

"But what's so odd about it having –"

"Of course it isn't odd that there's more than one orifice. That's a given. Who knows how many more are buried beneath miles of rock? Who knows the shape of the thing down there?" he said, pointing down at our feet. Without even really thinking about it I flexed my feet through my high-tops; the ground felt solid, unyielding. "What They don't want anybody knowing," he said, leaning in a little to me, "is where those orifices are. How far they are from the fence around the Pit."

I felt an indescribable knot of dread clench inside my stomach. I was confronting something I had already known, something I had suspected but had been unwilling to put a conscious voice to, even inside my own head.

"Miles," he whispered. "Dozens of miles. Almost eighty, the furthest one we know about."

"Eighty miles," I murmured, thinking of it. "It must be huge, enormous; it must –"

"There are containment buildings around each one, disguised as warehouses, construction sites, power plants, things like that. In the 70s they tried to seal them up but..."

"But what?"

"Let's just say it – the Pit – didn't like that."

I frowned. "But I never read anything about –"

"This was back in the 70s. They kept a tighter grip on things. When they integrated with the National Park Service, there was a lot less of that. You can't keep as much information hidden in a huge bureaucracy like that – unless it's something really serious, of course. Like, say, what happened on July 4th. This event, it was way less tough. Nobody died, nobody got hurt, but people, especially people in leadership positions, they got scared. Took steps to make sure it wouldn't happen again."

I guess we know how that turned out.

He told me the whole story, his story, not that of the park, not really. They touch and intersect and intermingle but I got much more of a sense of his relationship with it, with the park, with the people he worked with, with the gigantic animal that made up its walls and caverns, than just a history lesson with dry facts repeated on end until I was bored to tears. He told me of the terrible things he'd seen and on some occasions of the terrible things he'd done; of the time when he found a man with his leg gnawed off by a venous shamble, a slithering, snakelike, hissing thing that only attacks when cornered and otherwise lurks in the shadows of arterioles and veins, darting out to snatch a wayward macrobacteria or lesser copepod from time to time. He told me of the terrible fear and sickness he'd felt, watching the poor man, an unhealthy-looking fellow in his fifties in a gaudy rented tourists' suit, moaning weakly while the shamble had probed the ripped flesh of his thigh with its feeding tubules, drawing forth gobbets of still-living flesh with a horrible sucking sound that Peter confessed haunted him late at night sometimes. He'd drawn his service pistol and put five bullets into the shamble before it had retreated and had had to force himself not to put a sixth into the man.

He told me of a time where he and a colleague had pursued a rapist from a hot spring down into a service access that opened into the raw, wet, pink wilderness of the Pit. Ordinarily it was sealed and locked but they had been doing maintenance on it and it was left shut but unlocked, and the rapist had gotten it unsealed and vanished into the darkness with no equipment, no light, no nothing. He had slipped on the helmet to his suit and gotten ready to pursue the man, but his colleague, his direct superior, a tall, fearsome head ranger he referred to only as Makado, had stopped him, and held his gaze with her steely eyes while she reached out and sealed the maintenance hatch, trapping the man out there, and then called on the general channel on the radio, instructing all the maintenance teams to double-check whatever hatches they'd used when they got back in. The rapist was never seen again.

"What's ballast?" I asked him when he was through with that story. He looked at me with a clever but curiously earnest gaze, as though he wanted my approval. He wanted, I realized belatedly, for me to tell him he'd done the right thing. He must have never told anybody this story before. And for good reason, since his inaction made him an accessory to murder. By this point it was seven at night, and I'd replaced the SD card in my voice recorder already. I had no judgment in me. I looked at him with wide, careful eyes, and an understanding passed between us, but I don't know if he understood what I understood.

Ballast, he told me, was a substance produced by the creature, by the Permian Basin Superorganism, a sort of magical panacea that the eggheads, in his words, thought was related to the thing's endocrine system and was involved in balancing its hormones. In humans, though, it partially reversed the effects of aging, provided an energy boost, had mild curative properties, and was a fearsomely powerful aphrodisiac. He told me of the ballast bulbs, vast pools of the stuff, secreted through whatever process, taken and pumped upwards into watered-down pools of it, a large infinity-pool at 5% concentration, and then progressively cozier ones with higher percentages, marketed as adult-only.

"There's no way the government was down with that," I told him, disbelieving, but he'd shrugged, said that it had been the main draw to the place back in the Anodyne days, that once the NPS took over they'd tried to de-emphasize and phase out that attraction but the pushback had been so uniform, widespread, and aggressive that the Powers that Be had eventually thrown up their hands and said 'alright, you damn monkeys, you want your aphrodisiac pools and anonymous sexual encounters? Fine! Don't get cum in the pool filters!'

His words, not mine. I asked if they still took the ballast out of the thing and sold it and he shrugged, said he thought they did but in much smaller volumes than in the past.

"Was it always just for medical purposes or did they, you know...could I like, go down to the store and buy a thing of ballast?"

"No," he shook his head, "it wasn't quite like that. They did put it in certain products though, seasonal stuff...did you ever have a Coke Heartthrob?"

My mouth fell open and then I shut it while I tried to think of how to answer that question. I saw his eyes dart down to my cheeks as I felt them start to prickle and he had the grace to blush as well and look away from me. "I'm sorry," he said awkwardly, "I didn't mean to...bring up memories."

I'd lost my virginity due in part to a Coke Heartthrob. I hadn't thought of it in years, ever since they'd discontinued it. I never knew why. I never knew what they put in it. I remember googling "when did coke get rid of heartthrob" at some point in 2009 and found out that 2007 was the last year they'd had it for sale and feeling oddly nostalgic and disappointed for a couple of days until I forgot about it; I'd never known...

Whenever I thought of it I thought of the warm, fuzzy rush it gave me, not enough for any major high or anything but just a pleasant rush of pins and needles all down my body in waves, converging on my groin, turning into a vague heat and then into a throb along with my heartbeat. It certainly made me more...uninhibited, back then, seventeen, after school in the chorus room, that first time. Maybe he'd known what it would do to me, but I certainly hadn't, and even if I had I wouldn't have felt taken advantage of. He didn't have to buy me a Coke to get me eager the second or the third time. Or the fourth. Or the fifth, sixth, seventh...

Peter said something and disrupted my hazy reminiscing. I blinked at him and asked him what it was, and he said that my phone was ringing and, sure enough, when I actually paid attention to it I heard it vibrating in the front pocket of my jeans. I pulled it out just in time to miss the call; my dad, trying to call me back. I stared at it then put it back in my pocket, returned my attention to Peter.

"Did you need to take that?"

"No," I assured him. "Please, continue."

The Pit wasn't horrible. He made very sure to stress that to me. It was the best place he'd ever worked, something more than a job, more like a calling. He felt at home in the bronchial canals and the tubules and ventricles and aortas and what the hell ever else the thing has down there. There was, he explained, a scenic beauty to it equal to the likes of the mountains of Colorado or the Black Hills or the Badlands, or the endless forests of Minnesota, just a different sort of beauty, one that wasn't eager to share itself with the casual observer. The ordinary person, he explained, goes down the Flesh Pit expecting a horror show, wanting to be disgusted, to be terrified, to treat it like a thrill ride at a carnival. They can't get out of that mindset and everything seems horrible to them, from an innocuous herd of macrobacteria trampling along outside a fenced-off path to their habitual feeding ground, to a vast air-filled bladder with calcium deposits like stalagmites crenellating inwards like the spikes on an iron maiden.

"If you made up your mind before you went and saw it," he told me, "if you didn't even try to appreciate the Pit for what it is, you'd never come back. You'd go once and be grossed out and you wouldn't get what the fuss was about. But it can...it can touch you. It's the last wilderness on Earth," he asserted, a far-off, dreamy look in his eyes. While he's talking about the Pit he doesn't look nearly as tired and worn-down and dreary as he does normally. Something about it still animates him, fuels his sense of wonder. While he talks I find myself pondering, briefly, whether or not there's anything at all in my life I'm that passionate about.

He's halfway through telling me about a chyme deposit he found once ("what's chyme?" I ask; "half-digested food," he tells me. I almost make a face but I remember what he told me about going into the pit with preconceived notions and control myself) that had transformed over what must have been months in a digestive gland from a pile of deer carcasses into a pile of delicate, frilly, ribbon-like, waxy material that crumbled to dust when he touched it. Indigestion, Makado had explained when he told her about it, but something about its delicacy, about its uniformly rich creamy color, a symbol, at least in his mind, of purity amid the rugged, flesh-toned, vein-scored surroundings of the Pit, had touched him deeply.

My recorder makes a beeping noise to tell me that the third SD card is full. I check my bag; I have two left. Peter stretches, smiles at me.

"I need a smoke," he says, nodding towards the door. "Let's take a break."

We take a break.

* * *

I'm only on my second cigarette when the car pulls up. Peter's still on his first. The sun is cracking like an egg, bleeding over the hills that backdrop the town and casting warm orange light on both of our faces. The car drives up slowly, a big black SUV, looking better maintained than any of the other cars I've seen in town. No giant rust spots, no dents, no bumps, not even a burned-out headlight. It's dark enough that I can't make out who's driving. They pull crosswise along three spaces, horizontal to us, and roll down the passenger window.

Inside is a small, fragile-looking woman, maybe around thirty-five or forty. Her face is lined but still fair and her hair is long and black. Dark eyes, severe mouth. "Hello Peter," she says, her eyes flicking over to me. "Who's your friend?"

"My name's Roan," I tell her before Peter can answer. "Who's asking?"

She smiles at me faintly. "Erica Walken," she says, as though it ought to mean something to me. I stare back at her, take special care not to move my facial muscles an inch. I let the silence stretch out and when I feel it ought to snap I nod at her.

"Good to meet you," I say.

Peter shifts next to me. He's uncomfortable. Obviously he knows Erica. She turns her attention to him and I sneak a glance at him out of the corner of my eye under the pretense of taking a drag of my cigarette and meet his eyes as he sneaks a glance at me. He looks away quickly but not before giving me a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head.

"I'm not interrupting anything, am I?" Erica asks.

"No," Peter says quickly, stepping forward, closer to her car. "Roan was just waiting for a ride."

"Oh, do you need a ride? I wouldn't mind dropping you off somewhere," Erica suggests, smiling at me. It isn't a malicious smile but I've found that the people who mean to do you harm rarely tell you they're going to do so. There's a prickle at the base of my stomach, a fragment of worry that I've learned to listen to. I shake my head.

"My mom always warned me about taking rides with strangers," I tell Erica, keeping my tone neutral.

"Suit yourself," she says, without even an ounce of attitude. Her eyes flick like roulette balls, fix on Peter. "Can we have a chat?" she asks him.

"Sure," he says, leaning in the window.

"Alone," she clarifies.

I roll my eyes at the theatrics, put the cigarette out in the ashcan. "I'll be inside," I tell Peter, and force myself not to glance back even though I can feel two sets of eyes on me as I traipse in the 7-11, let the door bang shut behind me.

Their conversation doesn't take long. Five minutes max. At one point she pulls out her phone to show him something. I can't get a good look at it but it looks like a picture of somebody. I'm too far away to make out who, and I don't want to be overt about my snooping. When they're done she drives off and Peter stands there staring after her for a moment before coming back in. He looks troubled.

"Who was that?"

"Erica," he shrugs. "She's with the cult."

I almost get soda up my nose. "Excuse me?" I ask, once I've recovered. "Did I hear you correctly?"

"Did you pay for that soda?"

"All this time and I'm not entitled to a free soda?"

"It's three bucks."

"Three bucks for a 20-ounce? And wait, hang on, what the hell do you mean by 'the cult?' There's a cult?"

"You didn't think there'd be a cult?"

I give him a deadpan look. "No, sorry, of course, I should have assumed that as soon as I entered Gumption I was suddenly going to be in a Lovecraft story. Do we have fish people as well somewhere?"

He doesn't get the reference. I think of explaining it to him but I really, really don't feel like I have enough energy for that. I wave his confused look aside. "What the hell does the cult want? Are they – what the fuck," I finish. I have too many questions, they're all zipping around all at once. "Are you with the cult?" I ask, finally, giving him a wary look.

"No!" he says quickly, glancing around as though he's afraid all of the nobody inside of the empty store with us might overhear. "I'm not with the cult," he hisses. "Don't worry."

"Is this something I need to be concerned about?"

"Just – look, they're harmless. Just a bunch of crazies who fell victim to the common human need to submit to a higher power. They chose the Pit, that's all. That's it."

"So why's it a cult? Are they mixing the kool-aid right now? Is this place going to be Waco 2 in a couple of weeks?"

"Christ, it isn't that crazy. They just get a little – there's this thing they do. They're secretive. Invite-only. Exclusive group and everything. They do a ripoff spirit journey when you get in, if you're serious about it and you pass their tests. Have to go down the Pit, hang out there for two, three days, come back with some kind of transcendent experience. All I do is help smuggle their initiate in whenever they've got a new one along with the other batch of crazies." He shakes his head. "Those poor motherfuckers."

"What did you mean the other night when you said you had been one of them?" I ask. I'd been waiting all night to ask it but there had never seemed to have been a good moment up until just now. I reach out with a deft motion and click the voice recorder back on. He looks at me and for a moment I wish I were a photographer, not just a hack with a SLR I got off ebay with a catch in the shutter. "I don't want you to –" he starts, and then stops. I groan at myself, then reach out, lay my hand gently atop his, fingers apart, not clutching, just human contact. He looks at my hand and then back at me.

"I'm not judging you," I tell him. "I want to understand."

He considers that for a moment. He rubs his eyes, then nods. "Okay," he says.

He tells me about July 4th.


	4. Chapter 4

"You kids really ought to feel ashamed of yourselves," Peter says to them, and one of them, at least, the youngest, probably, judging by his looks, by the baby fat still on his cheeks, has the decency to feel embarrassed, to cast his glance downwards and away, to let his cheeks color with the shame of it. The other two, older, lankier, cooler, probably, just stare at him, hands folded in their laps. One of them, the girl, snaps her gum loudly.

There in the break room of Ranger Station 34c, the one with the old beige-painted walls that they never got around to redoing when they renovated the rest of the old Anodyne-era ranger stations, and the big poster from the 80s about the Roadless Rally, it's easy to forget that just fifty feet below them is a pool of gastric acid powerful enough to strip flesh from bone within about five minutes flat, assuming total submersion.

"It was just a joke," the older boy says, and Peter rolls his eyes.

"Do you feel like it was a joke?" he asks, turning his gaze to the younger one. He must be around thirteen or fourteen. His hair is short but messy, like the barber wasn't paying attention when he'd cut it.

"No," the boy says, quietly, not willing to look Peter or the other two in the eyes. The girl snaps her gum again and Peter points at her.

"Spit that gum out," he tells her, nudging the wastepaper bin forward with his foot. Inside it he can see a printout of the memo that they'd emailed around earlier about the park staying open later for the firework show. Peter had groaned initially when he'd gotten it but then the promise of time and a half was transmitted in a reply and he'd felt better about it. The girl stares at him defiantly.

"You can't make me," she says. "You're not a cop."

"In here I am. Didn't you know that? Down here Rangers have almost the same authority as police do," he says, conscious, suddenly, of how he's resting his forearm almost lazily on the butt of his pistol. "I can make arrests, write tickets. Anything you can think of."

"Can you hold us here without charging us?" the older boy asks suddenly. He looks up at Peter with defiant eyes. "I want to –"

"How old are you?" Peter asks, not letting him finish. The boy shrugs.

"Nineteen."

"Really? Let me see your ID."

"Don't have it."

"Not in your wallet?" Peter asks, looking over at the table to his left, where he'd put the three kids' things. He walks over to it, pushes the girl's sweatshirt aside, picks up the small leather wallet with the embroidered fisherman on it. "This one yours?"

The kid won't answer him so he looks at the girl. "Is it yours?" he asks, waggling the wallet at her. She shakes her head after a moment.

"It's not mine," the youngest one volunteers.

"Well, look at that," Peter says. "Process of elimination. It's either yours or mine," he says to the oldest boy, making a show of patting his pockets. "Hmm, now where'd I leave my...oh, there it is," he says, pulling his own wallet out briefly, showing it to them. "Looks like this one's yours. You going to have to tell me how old you really are or do I have to look in here?"

"I said I'm nineteen," the boy repeats. Peter flips open the wallet, sorts through an insurance card and a Subway giftcard before finding the kid's ID. He pulls it out and studies it.

"Nineteen, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Bad at math, huh? When's your birthday?"

"June third."

"The year, smartass."

"Uh –"

"Too bad. You wouldn't have to think about it. You're seventeen," he says, fingering the ID. "Happy birthday..." he stops, looks down at the ID and back up at the older boy, enjoying the way his face tightens. "...Fitzroy. Hell of a name."

"Alright," Makado says, bursting through the door, slightly out of breath. She glares at Peter. "I'm here. What the hell was so important?"

Peter nods to the eldest boy and the girl. "Why don't you tell her?"

"It was a joke," the girl says.

"Just a prank," Fitzroy agrees.

Peter shakes his head, looks at Makado. "These two," he says, pointing to the girl and the boy, "pushed this kid off of a walkway and were taunting him while he was slipping down into the pool below this ranger station." He gets a perverse sort of satisfaction watching Makado's chocolate-brown complexion pale slightly.

"Jesus," she breathes. "Thank you for not putting that on the radio."

"I'm not a total idiot."

"Look, what's the big deal?" the girl says. "It's not like we were going to let him drown, we would have jumped in after him."

The youngest boy shudders. Peter watches Makado's eyes narrow. "Did you see any signs down here?" she asks, her tone very cold. After a moment the girl shakes her head. "You," she says, turning her attention to Fitzroy. "People are only allowed down here as part of a ranger-lead tour, how did you get down here?"

He mumbles something. "What was that?" Makado asks, cocking her head, and he explains that they waited until a ranger slid his card to unlock the fence and then distracted him once he'd gone through by pretending to be lost and had asked questions for long enough that he'd forgotten to lock the gate after him. Makado rolls her eyes on hearing this, looks at Peter. "It must have been DeAngelis," she says. "He's the only one dumb enough to fall for that."

"Not everybody's as paranoid as you are," Peter reminds her, and she laughs.

"And yet I'm a head ranger and everybody else isn't. Wonder why that is?"

"Can we go now?" the Fitzroy asks, and Makado glares daggers at him.

"Absolutely not," she says. "You two," she says, pointing at him and the girl, "are going to the police station topside, and you're going to be booked for attempted murder."

"What?" the girl shrieks. The boy looks scared for a moment but regains his cool and laughs.

"You're just trying to scare us," he says, but Makado shakes her head, looking grimly satisfied.

"First," she says, counting on her fingers, "you're trespassing. On federal property, I should add, which is a fairly serious crime. Up to six months in prison, and a $500 fine."

"But we were –"

"Shut up," Peter tells them.

"Second, you aren't being incredibly cooperative right now, which is really only going to make things worse for you in the long run."

The girl looks like she wants to say something but thinks better of it.

"Third, the pool beneath this structure is the largest digestive bulb in the upper pit area," she says significantly, glancing between the three of them. The younger one frowns, then pales. "You have any idea what that means?" she asks the girl, who shakes her head.

"The pool isn't water, or whatever you thought it was. It's acid."

"Bull," the older boy says.

"You think we'd be going to all this trouble if we weren't serious?" Peter asks. Neither of them have an answer. He looks over at Makado, jerks his head towards the table behind them. "Check out what's in the wallet over there."

She looks at him, then turns around, flips open the wallet. Peter can hear her rustling through it but he's watching Fitzroy, watching the way he squirms, watching the way he can't quite seem to meet Peter's eyes.

Makado makes a very small noise that Peter swears must have been her chuckling, but when she turns back around, perhaps a half a second later than he might have expected her to, her face is deadly serious. "Looks like we're adding drug possession to the list of charges," she says. Fitzroy makes a strangled noise somewhere in his throat and the girl groans.

"Come on!" she says. Her tone is pleading. "It's only a dub!"

"I'm going to pretend I know what that means," Makado tells her. She turns to Peter, leans in to whisper in his ear. "I'll call someone. Take them up to the surface and kick them out."

"No charges?" he murmurs.

"Of course not. They're kids. I'll keep the weed, though, that should teach them a lesson. Probably about twenty dollars' worth in this bag."

Peter nods and Makado pulls her radio out of its holster, clicks it over to the general channel. "Makado here, unattached rangers in lower gastro zone B, respond please."

She takes her finger off the button and waits. Quiet static rumbles to itself on the channel, then the radio squawks.

"Makado, it's Maria. I just clocked out and I was heading back to the LVC, do you need me to clock back in?"

"Stand by, Maria," she says. She glances at Peter. "I forgot," she growls. "There's that stupid fireworks display tonight."

"Yeah, we're staying open until..."

"I forget. Midnight? Something like that."

"Hey, you're a Head Ranger, I figured you would know."

"Wait a minute," Makado frowns, clicking the radio on again. "Maria," she asks, "isn't everybody working late tonight? Why are you clocking out already?"

"I got permission from Carl," Maria says. "Cause my mom is in bed with that fever, you know, and I have to pick up my kid, and I don't have anybody else who can –"

"Okay, Maria," Makado says, "that's okay. You go on and go home."

"Are you sure? I've got about half an hour before –"

"Don't worry about it, Maria. Makado out."

"Roger."

Peter looks at Makado and Makado looks at Peter. "Whatever," she says. "We can take them up."

"You don't have more important things to do?"

"Probably," she admits. "But maybe I need a break."

"Alright kids," Peter says, turning to the three of them. Fitzroy and the girl have been whispering back and forth to each other the whole time, their faces drawn and serious, the gravity of the situation finally breaking over them. The youngest one is trying not to look smug but that disappears when Peter glares at him, lumping him in with the three of them. "All of you are in big trouble. Even you," he says, pointing to the youngest. "What's your name?"

"Tyler," he says in a small voice.

"Tyler, you were still trespassing. Don't think you're getting out of this scot-free."

"Are we doing good-cop bad-cop?" Makado murmurs in his ear. He can feel her breath on his earlobe and it sends a row of goosebumps cascading up his spine. "I thought I was usually the bad cop."

"You can be the bad cop later," he mutters back, keeping his eyes fixed on the kids. He feels more than hears her lips part in a smile.

"Let's go," she says.

They do. Peter happens to look at his watch before they all file out of the break room, him in the rear, watching the kids; the time is 9:30 at night on July 4th, 2007.

* * *

While they're filing down the long fenced-in corridor out of lower gastro zone B back to the utility lift that will take them back to the Lower Visitor Center and, from there, ultimately to the surface, Peter considers the pink, fleshy walls pressed against the fence. This particular corridor suffered a contraction about a week ago when a stent failed and the Pit's muscles naturally filled in the resulting extra space. There was a tour group in the corridor when it happened and according to a friend of his, who was leading the tour group at the time, four people of the twelve fainted.

For the moment it's safe, though, since the temporary extra stents installed by engineering are holding back the passage from complete collapse, but a more permanent solution will have to be sought soon. From what he understands they'll have to either go back in and tease the flesh back from the fence and insert additional permanent stents, as well as repair parts of the path that had buckled under the sudden change in pressure, or give up on this corridor altogether and widen out a new one, link it up to the vast network of passageways making up the lit, reinforced networks of the Pit.

He doesn't reflect on it often, but when things like this happen, when stents fail, when things go wrong (which is thankfully fairly rare, at least in his experience), Peter can't help but think of what it must be like, to be trapped in a corridor like this if it were to totally collapse in on itself, if, by some unlucky and unlikely coincidence, every stent were to fail simultaneously. As far as he knows nothing like that has ever happened in the history of the park, but it's a possibility, if a vague one. If you were in a proper suit you'd probably survive, the suits are armored and rated against a certain level of crushing pressure, but the kind he's wearing now, the lighter, 'interior-work' suit, wouldn't be able to stand up to that kind of abuse. It's only the heavy, reinforced engineer suits that would let you survive, and even then if you didn't have a supply of personal stents and probably a laser cutter you'd be trapped there, alive but unable to move, surrounded by throbbing, crushing flesh, unable to do anything but call for help on your helmet radio and watch the air in your canister tick down until you ran out and asphyxiated.

Peter's not bothered by tight spaces – when you get hired at the Mystery Flesh Pit you have to pass a claustrophobia test, even if you're working at the Burger King in the LVC – but even without any phobia of it the thought isn't pleasant.

He finds his eyes wandering down Makado's figure, lithe and supple even in the bulk of her ranger suit, at the way her sides taper inwards and then frill outwards pleasantly at her hips. He watches her hips sway as she walks. He knows he shouldn't look but he does anyway.

Ahead of him he sees Makado incline her head downwards and tap her earpiece, listening intently. He flips through the channels on his radio briefly but hears nothing out of the ordinary – whatever she's hearing must be on the command channel he doesn't have access to. Still walking forwards, she turns briefly and looks back at him; their eyes meet for a moment, then she turns back around. If the look was supposed to carry any significance or meaning, he misses it.

She says something into the radio then slows to a stop, turns around. "Alright kids, hold up for a second," she says. Peter slips past the three of them, sidles up to Makado. "Got a call from Control," she mutters. "There's a flooding issue in the Sand Gullet."

Peter's eyebrows raise. "How bad?"

"Don't know. Engineering is on the way right now, we'll know more in a couple minutes."

"What happened?"

"Pump failure."

"I mean, that's not so unusual. It's been raining cats and dogs today and they really ought to have replaced those pumps in waves instead of waiting to do all of them at once."

"Sorry," Makado says. Something in her tone cuts a quiet sliver of dread across Peter's belly. "I misspoke," she tells him. "The emergency pump failed."

It takes a moment for him to process that but when he does his eyes widen. "Oh fuck," he says.

"Oh fuck," she agrees. "Listen to me. You're down here more often than I am. Closest constriction-rated shelter from here?"

"Safest is the ranger station we came from. Closest is the elevator housing ahead. Your call, you know the Sand Gullet better, if it's full enough that the e-pump would have kicked in..."

Makado shakes her head briefly. "We can make it back to the ranger station. Hunker down, ride it out. Safest place in a constriction, those gastric pools don't have many muscles surrounding them."

"It'll take ten minutes to get back there."

"Five if we stop talking and run for it. Let's go."

The kids almost panic when Makado tells them that the area is becoming unsafe and they will need to run as fast as they can back to the ranger station they came from, but Peter grabs Fitzroy and Tyler and Makado grabs the girl whose name he still does not know, and as they run Peter puffs out what reassuring nothings he can in between breaths, trying to make it seem like this is less of a big deal than it is. Than it might be.

They keep as quick of a pace as they can. Makado's lean physique could easily outstrip all of them but she stays at the girl's pace, helping her up when she trips and stumbles, letting Peter and the boys get ahead. They cover the long hallway in a few minutes while Peter focuses on his breathing, in through his nose and out through his mouth. Tyler is flagging a little but keeping up, and all of Fitzroy's cockiness seems to have departed him at this point. His eyes are wide and frightened.

The path diverges into a fork. They came from the left, Peter remembers. He puts his hand out, catches himself on the fence, pushes off and keeps running. He glances behind as he does and sees Makado, face drawn, eyes grim, nodding at him, just behind. He can smell the gastric bulb ahead.

The lights snap off with an audible click and a hum of powering-down electrical lines. "Fuck!" Peter yells, skidding to a stop, drawing the two boys closer in so they don't fall. Makado plows into his back and Peter stumbles but keeps his balance.

"Why the hell are the lights off?" she asks. "Did we lose power?"

"We must have," Peter says, snapping the flashlight from his belt and clicking it on. He angles it upwards towards one of the heavy-duty fluorescent fixtures but can't see any obvious signs of damage. "We must have," he repeats.

"Makado to Control, over," Makado intones, pressing her earpiece deeper into her ear. She repeats herself twice before shaking her head and pulling out her radio and flicking through the channels. "This is Makado," she says on the general line. "We've got a power loss in LGZ Bravo, can anybody confirm if this is localized?"

Nothing but static, stronger than before. She looks at Peter significantly. "It must be the whole park," she says after a moment. "The repeaters are down."

She looks at the kids. "We need to move. Now."

"Wait, Makado –"

"No time," she says, hustling them along towards the ranger station. The constriction hits before she's taken ten steps, and it's so strong that Peter drops his flashlight, sending it skidding crazily ahead of them and then off of the walkway through the fence, casting shadows that flex and writhe and skitter. The girl is screaming and Makado is huddling over her, keeping her still; one of the boys, Tyler, he thinks, cries out, and he can hear Fitzroy breathing heavily at his side, and Peter realizes that without even thinking about it he has grabbed them both and taken them down to the floor of the walkway with him. He wants to squeeze his eyes shut and wait for it to be over but he forces himself not to. Outside the fence the fleshy walls of the conduit they're in are writhing and convulsing. He can hear the faint, distant rumble of a carnal moan, coming from somewhere deep in the Pit's gullet, but the actual noise is really fairly soft; just a wet, squishing sound, the slapping of muscle twitching and clenching in on itself, and then a sound that strikes dread into his very core – the snapping pop of a hydraulic stent failing.

The lights flicker back online, which surprises Peter, and as they all blink in the sudden brightness he and Makado lock eyes; he sees from her expression that she also heard the stent fail, and they scramble to their feet, hauling the kids upwards with them. The girl is clutching her wrist; she looks almost mad with fear, staring around at the fleshy walls of the corridor, several feet closer to the fence than they were before the lights went out and still shuddering and convulsing against the retaining plate in the ceiling. He hears the stent nearest them let out a dangerous hiss. Makado shakes her head.

"Double-time it," she commands, starting back down the corridor.

"Makado, wait," he repeats, looking back down towards the elevator, a long way off and out of sight.

"No time," she says, pushing the girl ahead of her. Halfway down, where the stent failed, the fence has been bent inwards and the flesh is puckered into a wrinkled, ugly cone, leaving enough room to crawl through. It would be tight, though, and likely the fence would catch on some of their gear. Makado touches her earpiece and swears, pulls it out, then takes out her radio and examines it. Even from ten feet away Peter can see that it's busted; she must have fallen on it when the convulsion hit. "We need to get to that ranger station," she tells Peter, and he shakes his head.

"Makado, we can't."

"What?"

"Think about it. The power was still out when that convulsion hit," he explains, pulling his own radio out and handing it to her. As she takes it and plugs her earpiece into it, he continues. "If the power was out, then the hydraulics would have been out too. And if –"

"Shit, you're right," she says, reaching out to steady herself as another tremble runs through the corridor. Almost a full second after, they feel the walkway shudder as the Pit convulses again, someplace deeper in its anatomy. Tyler stumbles and Peter reaches out and catches him. For the first time since he's known her, Makado looks unsure. Past her shoulder, Peter sees the crumpled cone of flesh ahead of them crunch inwards another inch or so. He can see blood dripping down from the chain links where they've dug into it. He shakes his head.

"If we go down that way," he says, pointing at it, "we'll get trapped down there. And if the ranger station slipped or got dislodged and it's sinking into the bulbule right now..."

Another convulsion rocks through the corridor. Makado falls to her knees, then pitches sideways – the cone has finally crushed the fence entirely and canted that section of walkway at a crazy angle. Past it they hear a muffled thump as another stent fails. The Pit shudders.

Peter holds out his hand and Makado takes it. She nods at him.

"Alright," she says. "Let's go."

"Are we going to –" Tyler starts, but Peter shakes his head.

"No talking," he says, grabbing ahold of Tyler and Fitzroy's hands. "We need to go."

Two more stents collapse as they make their way down the corridor, jogging now, not willing to risk a full sprint in case of another rolling wave of convulsions pitching the walkway beneath them and throwing them off. Luckily, the stents ahead seem to be holding. The second stent that collapsed did so barely twenty seconds after they passed under it, and the noise was so loud that even Makado yelped in surprise and the five of them huddled closer together for a moment, watching the muscles of the Pit crush the reinforced steel into an irregular ovoid pellet. After that they hurried even quicker. The utility lift they're heading to is contained within a reinforced access shaft, one that Peter reasons will likely have been able to withstand the convulsions of the Pit, even if they've gotten bad. He wonders briefly, stumbling a little amid flickering lights as the corridor cants again, what things are like in the Visitor Center; if the power went out and there was a choke response simultaneously, there could have conceivably been some serious damage.

"Hey, Mak," he calls ahead, and Makado turns, breathing heavily, looks at him. She's told him not to call her that, not at work at least, but he figures that right now it's the least of their concerns. Plus it's easier to say, fewer syllables; less of a strain on his tiring lungs. Tyler is practically done for already and Fitzroy isn't doing much better. It's a long distance to the elevator and every branch they pass, Peter's seen something worrying. Corridor to Rest Stop 23? Collapsed inwards when a stent failed close to their end of the corridor. Lots of blood. The Pit's or some poor ranger or visitor trapped in exactly the wrong place? There's nothing so dramatic as an arm or a hand or a leg sticking out of the scrunched, wrinkled orifice. Corridor to the Lower Interpit Campground? There's a lesser copepod lurking on the rounded, livid ceiling, roughly the size of a deer, antennae prickling with anticipation as he and Makado stopped to consider it. Further down the lights were flickering, and even further down the lights were out entirely. They looked at each other and Makado shook her head.

"Mak," he says again. "Have you gotten anything on the radio?"

"Thought I told you not to call me that," she mutters, fiddling with the radio. She unplugs her earpiece, turns the volume up. They all listen; even Fitzroy and the girl cock their heads intently. Where before there was static and the tantalizing hint of communication, just too fuzzy for them to be able to make out, there is just a worrying soft noise. "The repeater must be completely fucked," she says. She switches to the general channel. "This is Makado, can anybody hear this? Respond, over."

The seconds tick by. Somewhere close by but obscured by pounds and yards of flesh, a stent collapses. Peter jumps when it does, the thumping noise like the beating of a heart, praying that it wasn't any place they needed to go.

The convulsions have slowed now, still passing in rolling waves of panic, but with longer and longer intervals between them. Even the girl, whose name he still does not know, doesn't shriek when the walls writhe, but merely looks at them with a horrible emptiness in her eyes, as though she's simply waiting for it to be over. She hasn't spoken a word in about ten minutes now, and Makado has to coax her into jogging with them when they do move forward.

Makado shakes her head, holds the button down again. "This is Makado," she repeats. "Can anybody –"

The radio squawks and they all jump. Makado nearly drops it. "-akado, it's – trapped in the –" a voice says, tinny with static. Peter can barely make it out, let alone determine who it is. Once the noise stops Makado taps the button twice. "Makado here, I don't know who said that but we can barely hear you, please repeat? Over."

"Makado," comes the reply, a little better. "It's Carl. Can you hear – now? Respond please."

"Carl, we hear you," she says urgently. "Are you alright?"

"No," he says. He sounds frightened. "I'm in access tunnel 32, a stent... -apsed and I'm trapped, I can get into - ...Campground, but –"

From there, the broadcast devolves into indistinguishable noise. Makado frowns at Peter. "Access tunnel 32, that's on the other side of the Campground, right?"

"Yeah," Peter nods. "32, 41, and 17 feed into it."

"Carl, we heard most of that," she broadcasts. "Get to the campground and sit tight, Peter and I will rendezvous there in ten minutes, how copy?"

Nothing. Nothing at all. Peter blows his breath out. "The campground is probably a mess right now."

"Yes," Makado agrees, "but it won't have constricted enough to have blocked off passage, it's too big of a bulb. We can get through and then meet up with Carl, and then we can all get to the elevator and take off together. If he's alone in there –"

"Do you want to split up?" Peter asks, looking significantly at the teenagers. They've been watching Peter and Makado's conversation with terrified faces. They seem to have accepted for the moment that they're safe, but whatever claustrophobia they might have had before they entered the Pit is coming back in spades. Tyler keeps looking up at the ceiling as though it might collapse inwards on them at any moment, although, realistically speaking, a collapse like that would be all sides and all angles at once, realistically speaking, and if it were bad, they'd be pinned between the fence and the walkway and get the breath crushed out of them that way.

"No, absolutely not," Makado says. "We've all got to stick together."

"But the kids –"

"I am not letting them go off alone and get picked off by a shamble or something, and I am not letting you or myself go and try to meet up with Carl alone and have the same damn thing happen. Did you see the size of that copepod back there?" she asks, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. "We'll have to go that way, you know."

"I know, I know, it's just –"

She reaches out, puts her hand on his shoulder, pulls him inwards. For one insane moment Peter thinks she is about to kiss him, but then her chin lands on his shoulder and she whispers into his ear, "Pete, I'm scared too. I don't want to die down here. But we have got to get these kids out, and we have to get Carl. If he's hurt, if he's in trouble, we're going to help him. You and me can make it happen."

Peter nods after a moment and then Makado squeezes his shoulder and is gone, hunkering down and gathering the three teenagers close to her. "Listen to me, guys," she says, "I need you two," she says, looking at Tyler and Fitzroy, to take care of...honey, what's your name?"

Peter sees the girl's lips move but she doesn't actually say anything. "Her name is Eileen," Fitzroy says.

"Eileen," Makado says, "you're doing great."

"I'm scared," Eileen murmurs.

"I know, honey, but you're doing great. We're going to be down here for just a little longer and then we'll be going outside, okay?"

"We have to go get your friend, don't we?" Tyler asks, and Makado nods. Peter turns around so that the three teenagers won't be able to see and takes out his service pistol, checks that it's loaded. He knows it is but something about doing this makes him feel a little better.

When he turns back around the kids look a little better. Tyler looks determined, at least, and Fitzroy doesn't look quite as panicked as before. He doesn't know what Makado told them; probably some kind of empty promise about them being back on the surface quickly. No, stop that, he thinks. We will be back on the surface quickly. This is just a choke response. They probably already have pumps working in the sand gullet. Everything will be fine.

They make the trip down to the campground cautiously. The copepod lurking on the ceiling has disappeared since they moved past and Peter isn't sure whether or not that's a good sign. When they get to the darkened section of the hallway Peter draws his pistol. Makado looks at him, as do the kids. He gives them a smile and shrugs. "Just in case," he explains.

But they are lucky and don't run into anything, other than another lesser copepod, a smaller one than the one before, that takes one look at them and scurries off like an overgrown cockroach.

The campground is situated in a large gastric bulb that, a very long time ago, had been drained of its contents and various campsites marked out, which provided for slightly more comfortable camping quarters than just setting up a tent in a bronchial canal or other tubule. It was roomy, with fairly spectacular calcium deposits for an area as high up in the Pit as it was. There were even a few electrical outlets, as well as a restroom. The convulsions have put all that to hell, though; the restroom and camping platforms have cracked and tilted, and while the retaining shunts and plates seem to be alright, there's a small rupture in the ceiling where it looks like a bone might have torn through the thin, vulnerable flesh, and a steady stream of what proves to be gastric juices is pouring in from the tear, mixing noxiously with the pit's blood and falling in thick, sticky rivulets to the floor, where it's already collected in a depression. A small pack of macrobacteria, about ten or so, are rolling about the pool; they must have came in from the entrance to the lower organ trails, over there on the left, a dark, gaping chasm in the floor. The stairs leading down to it still seem intact, so perhaps everything's alright down there – but, Peter reflects, if macrobacteria have gotten in, that means that something nastier might have as well.

"Do you see Carl?" he asks Makado, sweeping the beam of her flashlight across the vast bulb. The campground looks deserted, as it should have – there wasn't anybody in here all day, as far as he knows. There weren't any permits issued for this area, at any rate, so nobody, no guests at least, should have been in here.

"I don't –" Makado starts, then trails off. He glances back at her and then follows the beam of her flashlight, and sees a body laid out on the floor, almost in the corner of the bulb, with a round macrobacterium squatting evilly on its upper chest. He can see the ranger suit and knows it must be Carl, it simply must be.

"Shit," Peter says, taking a step forwards.

"Peter," Makado hisses, desperate. "Peter, don't."

"I have to see," he growls. "He might be okay."

"He's gone, Peter."

"Goddam it!" he says, as loud as he dares. One of the macrococci tumbling about the gastric stream pauses for a moment and they watch with bated breath, but it resumes its gamboling just as quickly. Peter creeps closer to Carl's supine form, the sucking noises the bacterium is making nearly turning his stomach. When he gets to within about ten feet of it he looks back at Makado. She shakes her head slowly but Peter can't stop, he has to know, he'd want Carl to be this tenacious for him, he'd want every effort to be made. He looks at the macrococcus; it's big and spiky, the size of a beach ball, its oral groove turned to Carl's face. He'll be okay, Peter tells himself, he's just passed out because of lack of oxygen, he's suffocating. If I get it off of him he'll be fine.

The bacterium's flagellae waggle with slow, lazy motions that Peter can't help but interpret as satisfaction. "Fuck it," he mutters, then takes a few running steps and swings his leg out like he were kicking a football and punts the bacterium away from Carl. It's a magnificent kick, really; it sails off in an arc and splatters against a calcium deposit fully thirty or forty feet away, a thick yellow mucus bursting out of it like a water balloon, the thing's deflated skin sliding weakly and wetly to the ground. Peter sees none of this; he can feel his gorge rising. Behind him, Makado groans and covers Eileen's eyes; Tyler looks away, but Fitzroy cannot stop looking, for there, limp on the ground, is the maculated, jawless corpse of Carl, his eyes popped and sucked out of their sockets, his tongue abraded to a stump, all of the flesh from his cheekbones to his collarbone devoured by the macrobacterium.

Peter doesn't recognize Makado when she grabs his arm and drags him away, cursing at him, begging him to work with her here, dammit, doesn't notice when Tyler and Fitzroy both take ahold of him and help pull him back the way they came. He regains control of his legs somewhere along the access pathway. They make it to the elevator and Peter collapses against the thick reinforced wall, eyes shut, still feeling queasy. He can't get the image of Carl's half-eaten face out of his mind. Makado pushes the button and then goes, sits next to him, rests her head on his shoulder. The kids huddle in their own corner, equally drained and exhausted. Eileen threw up on the way there and she still looks green.

"I'm sorry," Makado says.

"I should have listened to you," Peter tells her. "I should have just..."

"Don't."

"I should have –"

"Peter, don't."

He realizes that he's crying, then a moment later realizes that Makado is as well.

The elevator is on its way down, the readout proclaims, and Fitzroy lets out a ragged whoop. Makado lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding and wipes her eyes. "Alright," she says, looking at the teenagers. "We're halfway there. It'll take a little bit for the elevator to get here, but we're halfway there. You guys are doing great."

Mumbles and nods. Peter gets up and stretches. He feels a little better. Eileen even manages a little smile, after some coaxing from Makado.

It's quiet for a moment or two, and then there is a crackle from the PA speaker on the wall. Everyone looks up at it; Makado frowns, glances at Peter. "Anybody who can hear this," the voice states, "brace for choke response RIGHT NOW!"

Peter has only a split second to see the flash of panic flutter across the broad, fine lines of Makado's face before the floor bucks beneath them and hurls him into the wall head-first, and darkness takes him.


	5. Chapter 5

“Peter, wake up. Peter, please, come on. I know you’re breathing, you have a pulse, fucking wake up, Pete. Please.”

Peter cracks an eye open and sees Makado, forehead pressed against his shoulder, her own shaking with exhaustion and frustration and fear. He wants to reach down and touch her and show her that he’s awake, that he’s okay, but his arm doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with what he wants it to do; he can lift it but it feels like he’s a million miles from his body and whispering in the ear of whoever is really lifting his arm, but they can’t understand him and they aren’t very good at it to begin with. He blinks glassily and shifts his torso a little and Makado looks up and sees that he’s awake and throws her arms around him.

“Goddam it,” she mutters. She smells good, like peaches. Peter tells her this and she looks at him with a funny expression on her face, like she’s trying very hard not to smile and failing at it. “You really cracked your head, didn’t you?” she says. Peter tries to sit up but she puts a hand on his chest and pushes him back down gently. He raises his arm again and notices that a little bit more of his coordination has returned; he puts his hand on her shoulder and she reaches up and squeezes it.

“Are the kids okay?” he asks, and she nods.

“Yeah, they’re fine. A little banged up but we all are. They’re okay.”

Peter looks over her shoulder and sees the three of them, even Eileen, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes. Fitzroy has a cut on his forehead that looks bad, but it’s a head wound, so it’s probably nothing, and Eileen is still clutching her wrist. His eyes flick up to Makado. “Have you looked at Eileen’s wrist?” he asks. “She’s been holding it like that since the first wave of convulsions.”

“Yeah,” Makado nods. “It’s sprained, I took a look at it. Not broken, thankfully.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” she admits. “I’m not a doctor. But she wouldn’t be able to move it as much as she can if it were broken.”

“Good,” Peter says, making to get up, but Makado pushes him down again.

“Not so fast,” she says, unclipping her flashlight from her belt. “Stare straight ahead,” she instructs him, and when he squints against the light she rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t squint.”

Peter tries not to but even on the lowest setting the flashlight is very bright. After what feels like eternity Makado turns it off and shrugs. “You’ve got a concussion,” she says, “but probably not a very bad one.”

“Are you sure?” Peter frowns. “I feel like shit.”

“Yeah, you look like it, too,” Makado grins. “You were only out for a minute or two, though.”

“The choke response was over that quickly?” he asks, sitting up. His head throbs for a moment and he puts his hand to it, but the feeling passes.

“No,” Makado shakes her head. “Put your hand on the floor.”

Peter does and then he feels it, a slow rattling rumble from somewhere deep, deep in the Pit, a vibration that passes up his bones and makes his teeth sing. He jerks his hand back like it was scorched. “What the hell?”

“I know.”

“What is going on?”

“I don’t know,” Makado shakes her head. “I haven’t been able to get anybody on the radio, and the lift stopped halfway down. I think a contraction crushed part of the elevator shaft inwards so it can’t make it all the way.”

“Shit,” Peter mutters. “So we’re trapped down here?”

He glances at the three kids on the other side of the elevator enclosure, but they aren’t paying attention; Fitzroy and Eileen are huddled together, looking exhausted, and Tyler is laid out flat on the floor, shuddering along with the pit.

“I don’t know,” Makado tells him. “The elevator is fucked so that’s not a viable way up but there are others. I know there’s a ladder somewhere that leads up to the bronchial area in the layer above this but I don’t know where it is. Do you?”

Peter shakes his head. “No,” he says after a moment. “I’m down here a lot but I don’t think I’ve ever used that ladder. We always would just take the lift, like we’re –“

“- like we’re supposed to,” Makado groans. “And you don’t have the map downloaded?”

“No,” Peter tells her. “I still have a map of the eastern face in here,” he says, tapping the computer box built into his suit’s chestplate. Makado curses.

“Mine just has a map of the LVC area, I’ve been doing tour groups for the last three days.”

“You? Doing tour groups?”

“Don’t even start,” she groans. “Ryan and Fatoumatta both have been out, Ryan’s dad died and I don’t even know what Fati’s problem was, we literally didn’t have anybody else to cover.”

There’s another grumbling moan from somewhere deep below them. Peter watches Tyler shudder.

“Pit doesn’t sound very happy,” Peter mutters.

“I’ve never heard carnal moans like those,” Makado agrees.

“I know a choke response can be bad but even if the pumps failed in the Sand Gullet it shouldn’t have been this bad.”

“No. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

“Do you have a wireless link with the LVC? I don’t but I don’t know if your suit…”

“No,” she shakes her head. “I thought my suit was damaged but I didn’t worry about it until the elevator got fucked.”

Peter blows his breath out. “So we’re screwed.”

“Not so loud. We aren’t screwed, there has to be a way up to the LVC, you know how this place is, there’s always a damn ladder or access chute or elevator somewhere, you just never know where they are.”

“But if we can’t get any new maps –“

“Okay, here’s something, though – if we get to a ranger station or a call box we can jack in and try and get a direct line to the LVC that way. I think the wireless issue is the same as the radio issue, I think it’s just that a repeater somewhere got crushed. I don’t know if you know but they aren’t exposed, they’re literally just buried in flesh in places because they really didn’t want anybody screwing with them. It’s just that convulsions this strong are so rare this deep that I guess they figured it was an acceptable risk.”

“So if they buried it in muscle –“

“- which is stupid, I know, even if convulsions are rare, but who knows.”

“Okay. Well, we can’t get to the ranger station in that digestive bulb. There’s a call box in the Campground –“

“Not any more,” Makado shakes her head. “I saw it when we went in there, it’s fucked.”

“Then the closest one is going to be down in the lower organ trails. There’s a call box every half mile or so.”

“Christ,” Makado groans. “I really, really hoped you wouldn’t say that.”

“It’ll be fine,” he assures her.

“Those macrobacteria had to get in somehow. Where else would it have been but the –“

“You don’t know,” he says. “It could have been literally anywhere with the level of shit we’ve been dealing with for the last half hour or so. Ouch.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he says, putting a hand to his forehead. “I think I’m just catching up now, I have a killer headache all of a sudden.”

“I have a hypo if you –“

“I have some too, it’s okay. We all need to be sharp.”

“Are we trapped down here?” Fitzroy calls, and Makado turns and looks at him.

“No,” she says finally. Peter can see her struggling to think of what to say that won’t make the three teenagers panic. Tyler’s eyes are very wide, or at least they seem so in the red emergency lighting. “We’re just trying to figure out our next plan of action.”

“Are we gonna die?” Eileen asks, so quietly Peter can barely hear her.

“Not today,” Makado says. “Me and Ranger Pete here are going to get you guys out of here.”

“Okay,” Eileen says. There is not a lot of confidence in her voice. At least, Peter reflects, she’s defeated instead of panicked. Then he does a mental double-take and considers what a ridiculous sentiment that is. If she –

“Did you hear me?” Makado asks, frowning. Peter blinks.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she says, leaning closer. “You’re –“

“No, it’s nothing, I just zoned out for a second. I was thinking about how the hell we’re going to get these kids out of here.”

“Yeah, you and me both. At least it seems fairly safe in this enclosure.”

“Yeah. Have you looked outside lately?”

“No,” Makado says, “but it should be okay, I haven’t heard any more stents fail.”

“I was thinking more about wildlife.”

Before Makado can answer the floor bucks violently and Eileen and Fitzroy both yelp, but the tremor subsides slowly and gracefully, winding down with a jolting series of shudders that Peter can tell from Makado’s face she’s never felt anything like before; neither has he.

The elevator enclosure is fairly roomy, big enough for maybe ten or twelve people to wait in relative comfort. The walls are drab reinforced steel, with a few posters taped up about safety requirements and guidelines and a big recruiting poster encouraging people to apply for venterial engineer positions. This was never an elevator intended for guests to use – in fact, most of the time people wouldn’t have gotten to the Lower Gastro Zone through an elevator at all. Peter’s lead many, many tours down the mile-and-a-half walking path that meanders in a spiraling course down the Pit’s eastern side and finally lets out at a large, reinforced bulb that once was a gastrointestinal organ but, like the Campground, had been drained and prettied up and turned into a staging area both for returns to the Lower Visitor Center and for guests making excursions deeper into the Pit. Peter and the other rangers stationed there joked about it being the _lower_ Lower Visitor Center, considering the amount of traffic they usually got, but all jokes aside, Peter had loved his assignment. Generally speaking the only guests they had passing through and downwards were the serious ones, the ones who’d been on a solo or small-group excursion before and knew what to expect and as such required only refills of water, or propane for their tents’ support packs. It had been him, Makado, Carl, and a few others who tended to rotate out as needed, but then Makado caught that promotion a week ago…

At the time Peter had tried very hard not to feel sad, knowing that she’d definitely deserved it, but he couldn’t help selfishly wishing that someone else had gotten promoted instead so that he could continue hanging out with her and Carl and all the others. The past week had been so strange without her flashing eyes and no-nonsense demeanor and quick wit when they’d teased her. He’d known Carl had felt it too, even if they’d never directly spoken about it.

“Why don’t I go down to the Lower Organ Trail,” Peter says, interrupting Makado’s perusal of the hopelessly limited general map stored in her suit computer, “jack in and download a map real quick, and then come right back up here so we can plan?”

“Peter, I really don’t want us to split up. And you’ve got that head injury –“

“Mak, listen, think about it,” he says, drawing in closer to her. She still smells like peaches, he notices. “You want to take the kids down there? This is probably the safest place for them. You’ve got a door you can bar with some of those chairs, and these walls are solid,” he says, touching them. “Got through all those convulsions without any buckling. Yeah, the elevator’s fucked, but…”

“But what if,” she says, voice a low growl, “what if you go down there and get killed by something? Carl bit it from a pack of _macros_ , Pete. Just fucking macros. You know how many of them are down there, probably?”

“We don’t know that they got in from the organ trails,” he says. “There are a dozen other places that they could have came in after convulsions like that.”

“Don’t give me that bull,” Makado says. “You _know_ it was the organ trails. Where else would it have been? That copepod we saw earlier? That came in from the trails. It didn’t come in from a digestive bulb, its carapace can’t handle the acid.”

“It could have come down from upwards, from bronchial.”

“If it was in bronchial it would have been literally the only copepod there. There’s nothing for them to eat in bronchial.”

“You’re making assumptions.”

“What is it going to eat in bronchial?” she asks. “Tell me.”

“Giant mites.”

“A copepod _is_ a giant mite.”

“That isn’t entirely true and you know it,” Peter says. “Look, we’re wasting time.” He pauses there until Makado looks at him. “One of us has to go. You’ve got rank. Send me. Make the call.”

“We don’t have to. We can just go down tunnels until we find a way up.”

“You know that’s a bad idea as well as I do.”

“I’ll go, then.”

“Mak, no.”

“Look,” she says, eyes flashing, “you can put aside whatever notions of chivalry you might be having. I can take care of myself. It’ll –“

“It isn’t about chivalry. You are the ranking ranger of the two of us.” Makado looks like she wants to say something, but Peter gives her a look and she swallows it. “I’m more expendable than you are. You always knew it would come to this. I did too. It’ll be fine; I can just run down, plug in a line, download an automap of the area, and we’ll head out and be back to the LVC in time for a late dinner.”

Makado takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. When she opens them again she nods. “Be careful,” she tells Peter, and Peter grins at her.

“It’ll be fine,” he repeats. “Just down there and back. What’s the worst that could happen?”

* * *

“Fuck,” Peter mutters to himself, peering around the corner again. The timer he’d set on the suit computer ticked down off of five minutes a minute ago and the triocanth is still there in the middle of the hallway, its pair of long, stinger-lined tentacles still wrapped around the tubelike macrobacterium that it caught. It’s chewed open a hole in the bacterium’s thin skin and is busily slurping out the bacterium’s innards, leaving a crusty light-orange scum on the metal walkway beneath it. Peter shakes his head.

“This fucker is still here, Mak,” he says into the radio, as quietly as he can. He hears Makado sigh on the other end of the radio, her exhale blending with the static.

“Just be patient,” she tells him again. “It’ll wander off when it’s done.”

“Or it’ll dig a fucking hole into the pit wall and hide there waiting for me to walk past and sting me and then eat me, how about that?”

“Go around it.”

“This is a one-way trail, there’s no around it. Unless you want me to double back for fifteen minutes and hope that the next call box is intact.”

“We have time. There’s no rush.”

“ _You_ have time,” he corrects her. “Meanwhile, the one who’s actually out here risking his ass doesn’t know if something is sneaking up on him right this very moment…”

He can hear Makado smiling. “Have you tried looking around?” she suggests, and Peter rolls his eyes.

“I can see why you made head ranger,” he cracks, and Makado lets out a mock gasp.

“How dare you, sir.”

“I dare,” he mutters, taking Makado’s advice and looking around, checking the ceiling as well as the fleshy, writhing floor of the trail. He peeks around the corner again and sees the triocanth, its long wriggling tail twitching with delight. It looks to be about halfway done with the macrobacterium now. It flicks one of its powerful tentacles and sends a fluttering spray of bacterium skin flying.

“You just looked around, didn’t you?” Makado asks.

“Maybe.”

“I knew it!” she crows. “Hey, kids! Come here and let me tell you how _predictable_ Peter’s getting! Why don’t –“

“Quiet,” Peter says, and Makado turns off like a switch. He hears her telling one of the teens that she was just kidding and to go and sit back down but he doesn’t pay any attention.

The triocanth is gone. The husk of the macrobacterium is still rocking gently on the floor, its orangey innards oozing out of it like a spilled can of soda, bubbling lightly as it reacts with and oxidizes the metal flooring of the trail. He checks the walls and the ceiling but can’t find the tell-tale breathing hole that it would have made if it had burrowed into the Pit’s flesh; it made no noise, but triocanths usually don’t. “What’s going on?” Makado asks.

“The triocanth is gone.”

“Alright, so the way’s clear?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“It took off in a hurry. Like it was scared. It didn’t even finish the bacterium it was eating.”

“Maybe it got full.”

“You know what triocanths are like as well as I do.”

“Yeah,” Makado agrees after a moment. “Greedy bastards.”

“And not cowardly,” Peter continues.

“Do you think it noticed you?”

“Not likely,” he says, scanning the ceiling again.

“What are triocanths scared of?” she muses to herself.

“A shamble?” Peter suggests. Makado clicks her teeth.

“Same size range but shambles are pussies. I’ve seen a triocanth take on a shamble twice its weight before.”

“Alright, so not a shamble. What about a leechman?”

“They don’t come up this high.”

“They don’t _usually_ come up this high,” he corrects her.

“If they even exist,” she adds. “Let’s keep our considerations in the realm of the reasonable.”

“What about a –“ Peter starts, then stops.

“Peter? What is it?”

Peter reaches up, extremely slowly, and takes the earpiece from his ear. He can hear nothing except for the various drips and drops and fleshy stretching noises the Pit makes as part of its ordinary daily life. He can feel the rumble of a convulsion still wracking the Pit somewhere deeper down in its anatomy through the soles of his ranger suit, but the floor he’s standing on hasn’t bucked or pitched enough to throw him off in at least ten minutes now. The damage has been done; if a triocanth can get into the organ trail there’s clearly a torn section of fence or two somewhere.

But a triocanth is relatively innocuous; while it may have a vicious, paralyzing sting and a bad habit of burrowing into the fleshy walls of the pit to spring out and ambush anything that passes by, if he shot it with his service pistol it would die. It would take only a single bullet.

Peter has peeked around the corner again, trying to spot the triocanth. Instead, he sees an arm, reaching out from a narrow fold in the flesh of the Pit, there on the wall, a large, vertical slit leaking a little blood and pus from its bottommost corner.

The arm is long and thin and fragile-looking; it has too many bends in it, the forearm receding back to an elbow and then folding in on itself to another machine-like reticulated elbow. Its flesh is pale and slightly translucent; he can see a long thin bead of bone struck through with veins that pulse with blue, unhealthy-looking blood. The arm is huge, far larger than a human’s ought to be, though it still terminates in a five-fingered hand, proportioned exactly as a human’s, but large enough to palm Peter’s entire head with room left over.

The hand reaches out with exceeding delicacy and picks up the discarded skin of the macrobacterium and then retracts back into the slit, slopping a little of the macro’s orange innards over the wall of the Pit. There’s a coarse sliding sound that gradually recedes, and then nothing.

Peter waits, scarcely daring to breathe, for about three minutes. Then he picks the earpiece up and digs it back into his ear.

“-ammit, Pete,” Makado is whispering, sounding as if she’s on the brink of tears, “this is all my fault, fuck, come on, just say something –“

“Mak,” he murmurs, feeling a stab of guilt pierce through him. “I’m here.”

“Christ, Pete, you scared me,” she tells him, sounding like a week’s worth of tension has just left her body. “I thought we got cut off cause I didn’t hear anything but then I started to get worried –“

“Mak, listen to me.”

“What? What is it?”

“There’s a copepod down here.”

Makado is silent for a moment. “You mean a lesser one, right?” she says finally.

“No. An abyssal copepod. A big one.”

“Are you sure?”

“I saw its arm, Mak.”

“You sure it wasn’t just a really pale person?”

“Yeah, it was a really pale ogre-sized person with two elbows on one arm. Come on. Time to face the music.”

“What music?” she growls. “That we’re all going to get fucking eaten by a copepod? Tell me something better, Pete. Have you downloaded that automap yet?”

“Not yet. I’m proceeding forward now that the coast is clear,” he tells her, moving out around the corner. The metal walkway angles downwards and deposits him on the fleshy floor of the trail, and he feels the telltale grab of his cleats digging in with each step he takes.

“Maybe you should come back,” Mak suggests. “We can fall out to a different ranger station, the general map is saying that there’s one about a mile and a half to the east –“

“I remember hearing at least three stents fail down that corridor,” he tells her, edging past the slit in the wall quickly. It’s almost unnoticeable now that there’s nothing inside it to bulge the opening outwards; if he hadn’t seen the arm, he wouldn’t have known it were there. “You really want to take that risk?”

“No,” Makado says after a moment. “But I don’t want you to die.”

“That makes two of us,” he says. “I can see the call box.”

“How far?”

“Quarter of a mile. I’m in the home stretch. Radio silence now so I can listen.”

“Understood,” Makado says. She’s silent for a moment, then Peter hears her breathe. “You come back to me, alright?”

“Promise.”

“Break it and I’ll kill you myself.”

“Okay, I get it. Now shut up.”

Makado shuts up, and then the broadcast clicks off entirely, and Peter is alone.

It’s dark down there in the organ trail, and the jerky bob of Peter’s flashlight, slotted into the tab on the side of his helmet, is completely inadequate to illuminate the vast cavernous space. The organ trails, at least at this end, are some of the largest navigable spaces inside the Pit that aren’t sheer drops or extremely difficult terrain. The floor is smooth, struck through with veins and vesicles and callouses from decades of foot traffic.

While the organ trail’s surfaces appear open and occasionally wildlife does make its way through, all of the ways upwards, at least to this opening mouth of the trail, should have been blocked. The only way for something as large as an abyssal copepod to get there would have been for it to clamber out onto the trail and pull itself up through miles of open areas. But Peter knows that abyssal copepods practically never expose themselves like that; it’s only if they’re directly pursuing prey organisms that they will flop outwards of the tight-fitting vents and veins and arteries that are ordinarily their homes, for although a copepod is graceful and swift in the crushing grasp of a tube like that, its organically lubricated carapace shooting through at speeds of up to twenty miles an hour on a straightaway, out in the open it has to rely on the wriggling of its mammoth body and the pulling strength of its forelimbs to get around.

So, essentially – the armor and fences and sonic discouragement devices and electrical traps, the spike plates and scent lures and redundant obfuscatory canals, the thin web of interlinked and interdependent methods to distract, redirect, and prevent wildlife from making it to the populated areas of the Pit, has failed, at least somewhere. Probably a plate cap got jostled loose by the series of rolling convulsions and constrictions wracking the Pit, perhaps a speaker got crushed or a scent lure sealed off. The web is redundant but not exceedingly so.

Peter feels his paranoia growing as he makes his way towards the slowly pulsing blue light of the call box. This box in particular looks alright; the first two he passed we bent out of shape and clearly inoperable, crushed by tight squeezes of tunnel, but this section of the trail is so large that even if the muscles bunched around it were to contract, it wouldn’t touch him.

Peter gets to the call box. There’s a small pack of macrobacteria rolling past in a divot of the trail floor, perhaps a hundred feet away, but they’d have to spike their way up a sheer incline to get to him, so he’s not concerned. He notices with a small surprise that the soft grinding noise they make is oddly comforting.

The call box is splattered with something but it’s dried by now. He smacks the side of it lightly and the dried crust of it breaks off in a shower of tiny flakes. “Mak,” he says. “I’m at the box.”

“Great,” she says. He can hear her stretching as she sits up; she must have been trying to get some sleep. “There should be a jack on the side, unroll your aux cable and plug it in.”

“Do I have the right permissions for this?” he asks.

“Maybe. We’ll find out.”

Peter is halfway through reeling out the cable before he notices a blinking line on the box’s display. He leans in and squints at it. “Hey, Mak.”

“Yeah?”

“This box is saying it still has a telephone line to the LVC.”

“Really?”

“The status says ‘fine.’”

“Try calling them, then.”

Peter pulls the glove off his right hand and punches the button. The angled infinity-sign of the dialing symbol comes up and bobs back and forth. Peter stares at it as the seconds stretch onwards and onwards. He shakes his head finally. “It must be busted,” he says. “No response.”

“Hmm,” Makado grunts. “That or the LVC is fucked.”

“Don’t jinx us,” he tells her. “Let’s see if we still have data. I’m jacked in.”

“Okay. Slide your card.”

Peter reaches down into the acidproof pocket on his belly and takes out his ranger card and slides it. The box whirs to itself for a moment before the access menu comes up. “Do I want mainframe access?” he asks.

“No, hit 8 to scroll, it should be on the third page. Haven’t you done this before?”

“Nope,” he says, punching the 8 button a couple times. “I’ve always gotten my maps wirelessly. I think I was trained on this at some point when they put these new boxes in but all I remember is them saying that maps needed supervisor clearance. Why is that, anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s because the automap system does a ping every time someone requests it. Wear and tear and all that.”

“Well, that’s a damn inconvenience right now. The option is locked.”

“Fuck,” Makado says. “Okay, hit enter on it anyway.”

“It’s asking for a password.”

“Try putting yours in.”

Peter punches it in but the box beeps at him. “Access denied,” he reads off.

“Try putting mine in. It’s…”

Peter cocks his head. “I think we got cut off, say again.”

“No,” Makado says after a moment. “It’s just, you know, don’t laugh at me, alright?”

“Will you tell me the damn password?”

“Capital B bigmakpaddywack2258 exclamation point dollar sign.”

“Are you serious?”

“Type the damn password,” she tells Peter.

Peter bites his lip to hold back his laughter and types it in. His smile gradually fades. “Are you sure that’s your password?”

“Yes I’m fucking sure. Did you type it right? ‘Mak’ without a c?”

“Yes, Makado, I’m aware of how to spell your name. I typed it right.”

Somewhere in the trail there’s a sliding sound. Peter freezes. “You know what it must be,” Makado says thoughtfully, “they must not have updated my supervisor status yet. I knew that –“

“Shut up for a second.”

Makado gasps in mock affront. “Could you be any more rude to me?”

“Mak!” he hisses. “Not now!”

She lapses into an embarrassed silence. Peter drops into a low crouch, forcing himself to move slowly, and then turns, scanning the trail behind him. He reaches up after a moment and turns his flashlight off.

Peter can see nothing on the trail; the macrobacteria are still rolling past below him – the colony must be at least a hundred individuals, if not more. Peter slowly lets a breath out.

“What’s happening?” Makado whispers.

“Thought I heard something.”

“Please do not get paranoid on me out there.”

Peter peers up at the ceiling but it’s shrouded in gloom; if anything is up there he can’t see it. On the other hand, unless there’s an opening, the giant copepod he saw won’t be there – it would be too heavy to cling to the ceiling. “It was nothing,” he says finally.

“Are you sure?”

“No. But we need this map.”

“How the hell are we going to get it, though? If my password isn’t working –“

“Let me think.”

Peter tabs out of the menu and back to the main screen. The infinity symbol of the call he made to the Lower Visitor Center earlier is still bobbing back and forth, caught in limbo. He shakes his head. “Goddam it,” he mutters. He hears Makado breathing but she stays silent.

Peter thinks for a moment, then hits the control, shift, and caret keys all at once. The screen clears and then a blinking cursor appears, waiting for input. “Did anybody ever tell you the reset codes they use in Command?”

“No. I don’t even know how to get to the screen to put them in.”

“I do,” Peter says. “Control-shift-caret. But I don’t know the codes.”

“I think ‘idkfa’ might be one of them.”

“Really?”

“I overheard a conversation Sol was having with somebody one time, and he mentioned that, but I didn’t really understand and I don’t know the context.”

Peter types it in and punches the enter key. “’idkfa’ is not a valid command.”

“Iddqd?”

“If these are really the codes to anything somebody in IT ought to get fired,” he grumbles, but he types it in anyway. “Nope,” he says.

“I don’t know any others.”

Peter can feel the prickly knot of worry that’s been clenching tighter and tighter somewhere deep in his gut double in size. “Fuck,” he whispers. “I can’t get the maps, Mak, it won’t let me get the maps.”

“Peter, just wait, maybe –“

“Goddam it!”

Peter reaches out, and as hard as he dares, slaps the side of the call box. It makes a dull noise but a soft one, and even as his cheeks color and he looks around nervously at the rest of the trail, wondering if anything heard him, the box makes a chittering sound to itself somewhere deep in its innards and then the loud, tacky, 90s-esque tone of a call connecting to the LVC plays.

“Holy shit,” Peter says.

“Yo, who the fuck – who is down on the organ trail right now?” comes the voice from the box.

“Solomon? Is that you?” Peter asks, looking around nervously. He turns down the volume on the box as much as he can but the voice is still boomingly loud, echoing off the ribbed sides of the trail. It must seem much louder than it really is, Peter reasons, but the volume of it is still worrying.

“Peter? What the fuck are you doing down there?”

“Listen, Sol, can you get me an automap of this area? I’m jacked in but I don’t have the permissions.”

“Well,” he says, his voice as heavy and slow as it always is. “I can try, but things are pretty fucked around here.”

“Yeah, what the hell is going on?”

“Well, the LVC slipped down the gullet,” Sol starts, and Peter blinks.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “can you repeat that?”

“Give me one sec, Pete. I’m pinging the automap in that area right now, if it’s working you’ll get a download on your suit in a minute or so.”

“Great, thanks Sol. What did you say about the LVC, though?”

“The LVC slipped down the gullet,” Solomon says. “It’s at about a 45 or 60 degree angle right now.”

“Holy fuck,” Peter breathes.

“Yep,” Solomon says. “Check your maps, you should have it now.”

“You’re taking this pretty well,” Peter says.

“Knew this shit would happen eventually.”

“Is it still slipping?”

“Nah, it’s settled now. There’s some buckling down at the other end but Control is okay for the moment. Do you have that map yet?”

“Let me check,” Peter says, tapping on his wrist screen.

The automap system used in the depths of the Pit is a miracle of mechanical and computer engineering and cost Anodyne nearly a billion dollars to develop. Due to the Pit’s mutable and shifting terrain, as well as being a uniquely three-dimensional space, conventional maps became out of date practically as soon as they were drafted, or if they didn’t, they were so hopelessly general that any sort of close-in work became impossible and instead would rely on work-arounds that rangers and mining crews had to develop on the fly, which usually were inexact, imprecise, and unreplicable in the future.

The automap system, on the other hand, uses a system similar to sonar to send an ultrasonic ping through the tunnels of the Pit and then creates a three-dimensional map that can be downloaded to a ranger’s suit and manipulated using a wrist pad and linked to the ranger’s position via a positioning marker in his suit, allowing him to have an instant and accurate map of the surrounding area. The only downside is that the file size for the map itself is so large that, given the limited amount of space for an on-board computer inside a ranger suit, only one map can be held in memory at a time.

Peter watches the progress bar fill up and then taps on the file for the newly downloaded map. A few areas are hazy, indicating one of the ultrasonic projectors might have been inactive or malfunctioning, but the majority of the map is clear. After a moment the suit triangulates his location and he appears as a small green blip, which stays in place even as he rotates the map up and down, back and forth. He blows his breath out. “Got it,” he tells Solomon. “Thanks.”

“No worries,” Solomon says. “Gotta go. Lots of bullshit up here.”

“Are you okay?” Peter asks, but the call has already disconnected, and he is alone again amid the cavernous trail. “Mak, you hear any of that?”

“Got all of it, Pete.”

“Even the part about the LVC?”

“Yes,” she says. Her voice is tight with worry. “Get back here asap, we need to plan.”

“Can you connect to my suit? I’ll send you the map file.”

“I can’t get a link, already tried. When we…”

Makado is saying something else, but Peter allows her voice to fade into the background.

There’s a red blip on the map, there in the cavern with him. He looks up, looks around cautiously, but he doesn’t see anything; red would mean a moving object of fairly significant mass, but the map updates so slowly that it’s nowhere near to being a motion detector or anything. Plus, when the sensors spin down in a couple of minutes the updates will stop.

Peter takes two fingers, zooms in on the blip, then zooms back out. If this is accurate, it should be…

There’s a shriek of grinding metal behind him, and he whips around. He sees, outlined starkly by his flashlight, a long, gargantuan arm, reaching up from the cliff below, its translucent, five-fingered hand digging into the metal of the call box leaving dents easily six or seven inches deep. With a faint hissing noise the arm retracts and hauls the bulk of the copepod over the cliff, its frilly sensory antennae flicking with wild abandon. He can see the pinprick of his flashlight reflected in its limpid black eyes and takes a halting step backwards. His cleats, trying to dig in at the wrong angle, trip him and he falls, putting an arm out to catch himself. The copepod cocks its head at him, and then it reaches out, its hand seemingly large enough to blot out the rest of existence, and Peter doesn’t have enough breath to scream.


	6. Chapter 6

“Peter?” Makado asks. She frowns and then pulls out her radio, checks the battery level and the connection. The battery’s fine but the connection screen shows her direct link with Peter was cut. She curses and then switches over to the general channel. “Makado to Peter,” she says. Fitzroy and Tyler look over, then away again.

“Makado to Peter,” she repeats. “Come in please, our link got severed.”

She takes her finger off the call button and waits. With a repeater down, reception will be spotty but at short distances like this Peter should still be able to hear her.

The seconds stretch like taffy. All that she can hear on the radio is squirrelly bursts of static, nothing like a voice or a call.

She can feel the kids’ eyes on her; the static isn’t exactly quiet or innocuous. She counts to ten, slowly in her head, and then at the end of the count clicks the radio off and slips it back into its holster, and then rises from her chair and runs through a quick full-body stretch. “Alright, Mak,” she mutters to herself, eyes flicking over at the kids, voice barely audible. “Hey, guys,” she says, forcing herself to sound bright and cheery. _Just like a tour group_ , she tells herself.

They all look exhausted, Eileen most of all. She’s stopped clutching her wrist so tightly but Makado can see it in her eyes, she just wants to be home in bed and treating this like it was a bad dream. Makado’s been worried about her; she isn’t talking much, even when Fitzroy tries to engage her, and even though earlier Makado had gone and sat next to her and Eileen had seemed like she’d been receptive, leaning over on Makado’s shoulder and falling asleep almost immediately, while Makado had spoken quietly into the radio to Peter, she’d woken up soon after and gone and sat by herself, staring into space. Makado felt a twinge of dormant maternal instinct somewhere deep in her psyche, looking at the tall, lanky girl. She hadn’t had to take care of her little sister for years, but old habits died hard.

“There’s been a change of plans,” she tells them. “I’m going to have to go out and help Peter with something and I’m going to need you all to stay here and sit tight.”

“You’re leaving?” Tyler asks. He looks so young and so scared. They’d been doing alright there in the shelter for a while, now that things had slowed down and the convulsions wracking the Pit had diminished, but Makado knew that that situation could change at the drop of a hat. No point telling them that, though.

“Yes,” she says, “but only for maybe ten, twenty minutes. I’ll be back as soon as I can, I’m not abandoning you. Promise.”

Fitzroy nods; Eileen doesn’t look like she cares one way or another. “What if something gets in?” Tyler asks.

“Nothing’s going to get in,” Makado assures them. “Look,” she says, pointing to the door to the elevator enclosure. “That’s solid. No window, sealed along the cracks. Nothing will be able to see you or smell you from outside.”

“What about the elevator shaft?”

“Those doors take a lot of strength to pry open,” she assures him. “And anything that’s going to be able to wriggle its way past the elevator stuck in the shaft up there is not going to be physically able to open them. It won’t be big or strong enough.”

Fitzroy gives her a blasé look. “Are you just telling us that to make us feel better?”

“No,” she says, giving him a dangerous look. “I’m serious. That elevator door isn’t going to budge. This exit door, take a chair and prop it under the handle once I’m gone if it’ll make you feel better. I’ll knock shave and a haircut when I get back, that way you’ll know it’s me.”

They all look at her with complete incomprehension in her eyes. “No?” she asks. “Shave and a haircut?”

“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about,” Eileen murmurs. Makado makes a face at her.

“Thanks for making me feel old, guys.” She raps it out on the wall. “That. If someone knocks that on the door, let them in.”

“Oh.”

“See. You know what it is, you just didn’t know the name of it. Fitzroy, can I talk to you?”

“Yeah,” he says. Makado rolls her eyes.

“Over here, please.”

Acting like it’s a tremendous burden, Fitzroy gets up and saunters over to her. She leans in close to him. “Look,” she says. “We got off on the wrong foot. I was never going to charge you with anything, I told Peter to take you guys up to the surface and kick you out. We’re on the same side here. Okay?”

Fitzroy stares at her. He has acne scars on his temple and he smells like bodyspray slowly being consumed by several hours’ worth of sweat. His eyes, though, Makado notices, are wide and blue and concerned looking. He has honest eyes, which for some reason she finds surprising. “Was that pool really acid?” he asks her softly.

“Yes. The bulb that ranger station is – was in, that’s essentially a stomach. All that was acid. If Tyler had fallen in he probably would have died or at least been severely hurt.”

“And you aren’t going to charge us for that?”

“Fitzroy. Roy? Do you have a name you prefer?”

“I usually go by my middle name Robert.”

“Robert, you’re a kid. Kids do dumb shit. I’m not going to ruin your life over something where nobody got hurt.”

“But –“

“I’m not the bad guy,” she tells him. “I think after today you’ll probably have learned your lesson.”

“Okay,” he breathes. He looks like he feels a little better.

“I want you to take this,” she says, pulling out her emergency transponder.

“What is it?”

“It’s a rescue beacon, essentially. You break that seal there and then this will come off and there’ll be a button. If you press that, this thing will start screaming for help and somebody will get down here and help you. If me or Peter aren’t back within…let’s say forty-five minutes or so, turn that on.”

“Why not sooner? Or right now?”

Makado thinks about it for a moment. “Because everybody is very busy helping people who need it. Right now, we might be stuck down here, but I promise, I am going to get all of us out of here. Let them help other people first.”

“Okay,” he repeats. He puts his hand around the beacon and puts it into the pocket of his sweatshirt.

“Remember, twist it to break the seal and then press the button.”

“Easy,” he agrees.

“Yeah.” She squeezes his shoulder lightly. “You’re doing great. This will be over soon.”

“Really?”

“If everything works out, yeah. Now I really need to go. Remember to prop a chair against the door when I leave, alright?”

“Okay.”

And then Makado is running a hand through her curly brown hair, gathering it into a tight ponytail. She slips her helmet on and is out the door without giving the kids any time to doubt.

* * *

Even though Peter’s conscious mind is frozen, his instincts kick into overdrive as that giant hand descends on him. He snaps his leg out without even thinking about it and digs the cleats into the tender, vulnerable flesh at the heel of the copepod’s palm, and it makes a loud, angry chittering noise, its multifaceted mouthparts working furiously. Peter tries to pull his leg back in time but he can’t move quickly enough before its fingers snap shut around his ankle and it lifts him bodily from the ground and he dangles there, wiggling back and forth. The thing’s grip is tight and uncomfortable and he can feel his ankle shifting in its socket as its fingers squeeze, shifting lightly to get a better grip on him. Its other hand comes up and grabs at him but he twists and it plucks at thin air, then pulls back.

Makado’s voice has gone quiet; not even the faint hiss of static that undercut their conversations earlier is audible. The earpiece is still screwed tightly into his ear so that can’t be the problem, but the familiar weight of the radio in its side holster is no longer present. It must have fallen out when the copepod picked him up.

Peter has never seen a live abyssal copepod in person. He’s heard stories, of course – any ranger who’s worked the Flesh Pit has – but the copepods have an aura of myth around them despite being demonstrable, understandable creatures.

Nobody knows why they have hands. Even the scientists can’t figure it out; extraordinary evolutionary pressure, one of them had told Peter one time, when they’d ended up sitting at the same table in the cafeteria. The depths and challenges of the Pit forcing them to scrabble for any sort of generational advantage they could find. The older rangers and the miners, the ones who worked in the deepest areas of the Pit, where the copepods could usually be found, whispered of stranger explanations, though, but these were usually so outlandish that Peter found them easy to dismiss.

An entire three-day period of ranger training and orientation was dedicated to abyssal copepods. Everything else in the Pit could be put down with gunfire. True, some things like an amorphous shame or a shamble could take quite a bit of punishment, but if you shoot at a copepod there’s no guarantee it’ll do anything. Peter remembers watching the bits of video they’d played that first day, footage of copepod attacks on mining and exploratory trips deep into the Pit. He’d found it hard to believe the footage was real. The copepods had moved so quickly and had been so coordinated, popping up on one side of the dig site and causing a commotion as a distraction while three of them swept in from behind and snatched up four people, one of the copepods, the largest, carrying off two miners at once. The rangers there on the security detail had opened up on the copepods with the automatics they’d had but it had done nothing, the copepods had simply covered their vulnerable faces with their hands and let the bullets sink into their thick flesh or bounce off of their hardened, nacreous exoskeletons without any noticeable effect.

Earl, the grizzled ranger leading the class, had paused the video there and ushered them all outside, and they’d all walked down in a tight little group to the very middle of the Lower Visitor Center, right in the atrium, where, suspended from wires and perfectly preserved, was the only fully intact specimen of abyssal copepod that had ever been recovered from the depths of the Pit.

The thing had, Earl told them, crawled up the gullet, digging its hands into the flesh of the pit wall, leaving a trail of bloody pockmarks behind it like footprints. And then it had levered itself onto a ledge, a bony outcrop near the surface, where the sun had been shining, and it had laid there and died.

“Why?” someone asked, and Earl shrugged.

“We don’t know much about these things, about why they do the things they do. So I can’t tell you why exactly,” he drawled, “but I can tell you what I think. I think it knew it was fading. And it wanted to see the sun.”

The copepod plucks at him again with its free hand and again Peter twists out of the way. It keeps snatching its hand back after it misses, a telltale indicator that this copepod has run into rangers before. Maybe a miner with a taser, a ranger with an ESD gun, some experience in the past that let it know that humans can hurt it.

Electrical discharges tend to be the best way to deal with copepods. An ordinary taser, the kind the police use, won’t do more than tickle it, but every ranger station carries a rack of overpowered high-voltage tasers that would fry a human to a crisp but will knock out a copepod. Peter’s never had to use one, never fired one except for that day in training when they had to qual on them in order to pass. He’d hit five out of seven shots and that had been good enough. Hit a copepod with one of those, Earl had said, and that’ll put it on its ass long enough for you to take your knife and shove it right there, tapping the diagram of the copepod’s head between its eyes. “Its brain isn’t there, but a primary nerve is. Hit it just there, right in the center, dig the knife around in there, and you’ll paralyze it for the rest of its life, which will probably be about half an hour. Then just walk away.”

He made it sound extremely simple. Peter thought it was kind of sad, thinking about one of the enormous copepods, trapped there in its own body, unable to move, waiting for something to come by and eat it, or maybe for it to suffocate, unable to make its lungs breathe.

Peter reaches upwards to his hips and unsnaps his holster. The service pistol practically flings itself out and Peter fumbles with it for one heart-stopping moment before he gets a good grip on it. If he’d dropped it…

The copepod is drawing its arm back again for another swipe at him. Peter points the pistol at it, taking a moment to line up a shot at its head. The head is just as armored as the rest of its body, but the eyes aren’t, although that shot, hanging upside down in the thing’s grasp, would be one in a million.

The copepod’s eyes shift as he points the pistol at it and then it drops him. He lands heavily but scrambles to his feet as quick as he can. He sees the copepod cringe back, covering its head with one of its hands, the other blindly groping for him. He dodges a swipe and then turns tail and runs, his cleats digging into the floor of the trail and popping free with wet sucking sounds. It takes the copepod a moment to realize he’s booked it but once it does it screeches, sounding like a bucket of nails fed into a wood chipper, and takes off after him, pulling itself forwards on its powerful forearms, its frilled steering vanes beating uselessly against the fleshy ground.

* * *

Makado strides down the corridor boldly, one hand on the butt of her service pistol. She’s already sealed her helmet, just in case. No matter how hard she tries she can’t seem to get rid of the bubbling knot of trepidation, tensing in her stomach as she makes her way closer to the Organ Trail. A triocanth is one thing, nasty enough but easy to deal with, but an abyssal? Peter must have been mistaken.

 _But no_ , whispers a little voice in the back of her head. _Wishful thinking isn’t going to save you_.

She’s checked her pockets a dozen times on the way down but she doesn’t have anything that could properly deal with an abyssal copepod. The things are massive, cunning, angry tubes of pure rage, and if you were going to try to take one down without cheating and zapping it with an electro gun you’d have to use one of the big forty-mills they keep in the LVC for emergencies. Makado’s seen the plans, seen the contingencies, even though her clearance wasn’t high enough. She’d laughed at the time. ‘Organized assault by more than fifteen abyssal copepods?’ Give me a break.

Now, though, with the lights flickering and the floor throbbing to a sickly beat, she isn’t so sure.

_Alright, Mak. Think. How are you going to take out an abyssal?_

She still has no ideas five minutes later when she reaches the point in the corridor where Peter must have ran into that triocanth. There’s a great gout of bacterial fluid there on the grated floor, still wet and dripping, and huge spots of rust where it melted into the steel. She curls her lip; even though the closed-system suit prevents her from smelling it, she knows exactly what it would smell like, sulfurous rotten-egg stench mixed with a horribly biological rot-like odor, like week-old vomit.

There in the fleshy wall, she notices, is the slit that Peter must have seen the copepod reach from; it’s large, but it wouldn’t be large enough to let the copepod come all the way into the corridor without a great deal of squeezing and stretching. That must have been why all it did was reach out and grab the bacterium, she realizes.

For about the third time since she started her journey, she tries to call Peter again on the radio, but with even less hope of a response. Clearly something’s happened; she hopes it wasn’t the abyssal making off with him, but she forces herself to be realistic.

She reaches out to touch the rough-pink edge of the slit in the wall and notices her hand is shaking slightly. She makes a fist and then punches the side of the wall, hard as she can. Her knuckles leave four little divots in the flesh that fade quickly.

“Alright,” she says out loud. “I’m going to go and I’m going to _fuck up_ that abyssal cope –“

Her words catch in her throat as what she thought was a weirdly-shaped skin tag opens a set of six multifaceted eyes and looks at her. “Uh,” she starts, reaching down to her hip for her pistol, but the triocanth bursts out of the wall, propelled by its well-muscled, springlike tail, trailing slime and venterial lymph like a comet, and has wrapped its tentacles around her neck and constricted her arms to her sides with the rest of its wriggling body before she can even think.

* * *

The copepod roars behind him again and Peter ducks; another chunk of flesh with five puckered divots punched into it sails past him and slaps wetly into the wall of the corridor. Peter twists around. “Will you stop throwing shit at me?” he asks the copepod, which responds by digging its hands in again and lunging forward another seven or eight feet, but the sizable lead Peter’s amassed still puts him far ahead of the thing on the trail, close to the exit up to the Campground and the lower gastrointestinal zone. The thing pauses there and once again Peter reflects on the lumbering bulk of it, the banded plates and armor, the hands twitching with what he interprets as repressed rage. It’s getting tired, he guesses; at the start Peter was lucky to have gotten away from it before it was able to snatch him up again and disarm him but the thing was wary of his pistol, even though it wouldn’t really have been able to hurt it. He hasn’t shot at it yet, not wanting to have to, not wanting to reveal that the gun he holds loosely at his side isn’t an electrical stunner but just a puny .45 that wouldn’t hurt the thing if he didn’t nail it square in the face.

The copepod makes a fist and slams it on the floor repeatedly before it flexes and lurches itself another few feet forward. It’s such a human gesture that Peter pauses for a moment and watches it, watches the way its eyes glitter, locked on Peter’s, watches the way its sides heave with the vast gulping breaths it’s taking. He shakes his head eventually. “Fuck you,” he tells it, and then turns and jogs upwards, into the light.

* * *

“Goddam,” Makado keeps muttering, trying to flex her arms and break the triocanth’s hold on her but it’s no use, the thing is basically all muscle, it’s much stronger than her. It seems to have figured out by now that it can’t bite through her faceplate, after a few minutes of slobbering over her and leaving scratch marks on the reinforced glass of the visor, its three serrated teeth flexing with the effort, and now instead has settled for trying to crush her. She’d only just managed to slip one of her hands up around her neck before its whiplike tentacles had laced over it, but the extra space her arm gave her was enough to let her continue to breathe.

The triocanth’s dull eyes, arranged in two tripled sets on either side of its face, regard her. “Goddam,” Makado repeats. She opens her holster and starts to take out her pistol but the thing’s tail won’t let her move far enough to get it all the way out. She makes a face, straining against the triocanth, and it shifts minutely, enough to let the pistol free.

The triocanth reels back and then strikes her in the face, leaving a smear of venom on her visor, as well as a hairline crack that she eyes with trepidation. She can feel her hands shaking as she angles the pistol up, rotating her wrist carefully. She can’t tell where it’s pointed, if it’ll hit the triocanth if she pulls the trigger. She thinks it will but she also doesn’t want to shoot herself.

It pulls back and batters itself into her helmet again and the glass shatters; Makado shuts her eyes just in time but she still feels several shards dig into the skin on her cheeks and her chin. She pulls the trigger.

* * *

When Peter hears the gunshots his head snaps up, away from the map readout on his wrist. “Mak,” he breathes. He’d slowed a little when he’d reached the well-lit corridors above the organ trail, following the map and taking a shortcut back to the elevator enclosure.

There are three different trails she could be down; he picks one at random and sprints down it, careening off the walls when he overbalances, when his cleats stick in the metal grates and don’t come up as quickly as they ought. He’s tired and out of breath but he makes it down to the end of the corridor and turns the corner and finds Makado, limp and prone, the triocanth still wrapped around her, its head inclined downwards and covering her face. “No,” he finds himself saying without any conscious bidding on his part. “No, no no no no no,” he says, pulling his pistol out of its holster and training it on the triocanth. He reaches down gingerly and takes ahold of the recessed groove on the rear part of its exoskeleton, expecting it to whip around and go after him, but the triocanth just lays still. Peter frowns.

“Pete?” Makado asks, and Peter almost falls to his knees he’s so relieved.

“Holy shit, Mak,” he says, putting his gun away and rolling the triocanth off her. He looks at her, laying there, smoke still rising from the barrel of her gun, shards of glass still dug into her face, and she smiles at him and it is truly the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“I came to get you,” she says breathlessly, sitting up, glass pouring from the inside of her helmet. She pops the quick release and it comes apart in two halves. She lets it clatter onto the floor. “I came to get you,” she repeats, “when your radio went dead.”

“I came to get you,” he tells her, “when I heard the gunshots. I thought you’d died, laying there, I…”

He trails off. Makado is bleeding from a cut on her chin and he watches as she picks a tiny shard of glass from her cheek, lets it tinkle to the floor and then through the grate and down onto the flesh below. He holds his wrist screen out to show her. “Look,” he says. “I have a map. I know the best way –“

Makado doesn’t look at the screen even once. When he leans in closer to show her, she leans into him, and then she reaches up and puts her hand in his short-cropped hair and then she kisses him, and her lips are warm and soft and her teeth nip at his lips lightly and her tongue darts into his mouth for only a moment, running along his teeth and gums before it’s gone, and the kiss feels like it lasts forever but it’s over in only a moment and when she pulls away from him Makado is smiling so hard her cheeks are starting to hurt and Peter is looking at her like he loves her and he opens his mouth to say something stupid so Makado leans in and kisses him again and this time he puts his arm around her and she still smells like peaches and her shoulders are soft and trembling slightly and he can feel her chest heaving as they press together and he can feel her breasts against him and he’s having trouble thinking, and then there is a sliding, scraping noise behind them and Makado opens her eyes and speaks the words ‘holy shit’ directly into Peter’s mouth, and then she is scrambling away, tugging on Peter’s arm, for there, at the end of the hallway, the copepod has just pulled itself into view and is sitting there, staring at them malevolently, tucking its arms in and trying to squeeze its bulk into the hallway proper.

“You weren’t kidding,” Makado breathes. Peter is only just now regaining proper brain functions and he keeps looking at Makado like he’d still like to keep kissing her even in spite of the copepod and Makado can’t help but smile at him and reach over and squeeze his hand very tight for just a moment. “We’ll do more of that later,” she promises.

The copepod reaches up and knots its fingers into the metal grille covering the ceiling and pulls itself another few feet into the hallway. Peter whips out his pistol and aims it at the copepod and again it sees and cowers back, covering its face. Makado whistles. “This one’s smart, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t shot it yet,” Peter says. “I don’t think it knows this is just a pistol.”

“I have an idea,” Makado says. The copepod rocks itself side to side a little. If it gets a couple feet forward it’ll have moved the largest bulging section of its exoskeleton into the hallway and it’ll be able to pull itself along freely, but for the moment it’s still stuck. Makado leans down and picks up the dead triocanth, grunting under its weight. “Help me with this fucking thing,” she says, and Peter takes it by the tail, trying to still keep the gun trained on the copepod, which is now peeking through its fingers at them, and between the two of them, Makado leading the way, they stagger closer to the copepod. After a moment it puts its hand down and watches them carefully, its arms retracting with their telltale pneumatic hissing noise, putting its hands on the inside of the corridor. “On three,” Makado says, “we toss this thing at the copepod.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

She counts to three, heaving the dead weight of the triocanth back and forth between them to build up momentum, and then they toss it. It sails through the air and lands just in front of the copepod, which looks at them and then at the triocanth. “Now back off,” Makado says to Peter from the corner of her mouth.

They take a few steps backwards; the copepod reaches out and prods the triocanth gently. A few more steps; the copepod takes the triocanth in both hands and, with a ripping noise like fabric tearing, twists off the triocanth’s head and starts to eat it.

Makado and Peter turn and break into a jog. “I can’t believe that worked,” Peter tells Makado.

“Me neither,” she says. “Be glad it did. You know how to get up?”

“Yes,” he nods. One of the old evacuation shafts, the ones they put in when they were concerned about acid overflow. We can climb up and seal it after us and that’ll put us into bronchial.”

“Lead the way.”

It takes them ten minutes or so to make it back to the elevator enclosure. Makado raps shave and a haircut on the door and Fitzroy takes the chair down and opens the door and practically falls over with relief when he sees Makado and Peter. “Did you get worried?” Makado asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “There were these noises –“

“We can talk about it later,” Peter says. “Guys, we have to go right now.”

It takes a little bit to get Eileen moving; she’d fallen asleep again and it took a little effort to wake her, but they get the three teenagers up and ready to go, and then shuffle off down the hallway, Peter and Makado in the front, referring to the map as they go. It takes them down about half a mile of halls, including a few detours due to failed stents and, in one case, a truly enormous cloistropod protruding from the wall and making a low subsonic buzz that set Peter’s teeth on edge, but they make it to the access shaft. Makado swipes her card and it unlocks, and then they have to spin the wheel and unseal the door, which takes what feels like an agonizing amount of time.

The door opens with a foreboding hiss, and Makado clicks on her flashlight and peers up the shaft. “Alright kids,” she says, her voice echoing in the tight space, “who’s ready for a climb? There’ll –“

Before she can get any further, though, the Pit bucks beneath them and roars so loudly that they all clap their hands to their ears. Fitzroy falls to the ground and Eileen screams but although Peter sees her mouth move he can’t hear her. The shuddering intensifies and again he reaches out as best he can, his face screwed up against the noise, and gathers Fitzroy and Tyler to him and takes them down to the ground while Makado does the same with Eileen, and they all huddle there for the short eternity it feels it takes for the Pit to settle. Eventually it does, and the roar peters out into a low grumbling moan that trails on and on. Peter rises to his feet finally, bringing Tyler and Fitzroy up with him. “Jesus Christ,” he says.

Makado looks shaken. “What the hell is going on?” she asks, and then stops. She looks at Peter and he looks at Makado.

The grumbling in the background hasn’t stopped; in fact, it’s only intensified.

Makado turns and there, at the end of the hallway, far, far down, a torrent of sickly-looking liquid bursts around the corner and shoots towards them, and there, buffeted along with it, looking almost smug, is the copepod, its arms tucked against its sides, its frilled rudder-like legs churning the stomach acid as it jets forwards.

“Go!” Makado yells, and Peter pushes Tyler and Fitzroy ahead of him and they clamber up the ladder like the devil were chasing them. Peter goes up next, turning halfway, and sees Makado pulling Eileen into the shaft.

Just as Peter reaches the top and Tyler and Fitzroy pull him up, he hears a scream from below and he turns and stares downwards; the acid is slowly rising at the bottom of the shaft and Eileen has lagged behind. For a moment he thinks the acid has reached her, and then he sees the hand extending out of the acid, clenched around her leg, a pale, translucent hand three times the size of a human’s, and he realizes what he’s about to see. “Don’t watch,” he tells Tyler and Fitzroy, but they don’t move.

“Eileen!” Makado screams. “Hold on! I’ve got you!”

But Makado doesn’t have her. She can feel Eileen’s grip slipping even on the puckered surface of her non-slip gloves. Makado, greatly daring, wedges her feet between the rungs of the ladder and, twisting around, reaches down to grab ahold of Eileen’s other hand.

Eileen is crying, the tears are running down her cheeks, leaving streaks of mascara in their wake, but she stays silent, her eyes locked on Makado’s, even though Makado can see the copepod twist its arm and break the girl’s ankle like it were a matchstick. A shudder runs through her and her hand flies open and Makado watches her fall into the copepod’s grip even as the acid rises higher in the access shaft. She can see it reacting with a bubbling hiss as it hits the sebaceous residue left on the copepod’s exoskeleton, the waxy layer of secretions that allow the giant arthropod to slither through tight veins and arteries at high speeds, but only a small part of her mind recognizes this; the rest of her is too busy watching Eileen, up until the point that she hits the acid and the copepod catches her with its other hand and then it’s drawn her below the surface, tucking her up under its armpit like a parcel. It seems to glance up at Makado as she screams Eileen’s name again, and then it wriggles its body like an overgrown lobster and darts off into the rising effluvial muck below and is gone.

Makado loses her mind. It is only because Peter reaches down and takes ahold of her around the waist that he prevents her from jumping down into the acid to try and chase down the copepod and make it give Eileen back to her, ignoring the fact that the acid would already be burning its way through her like wildfire, sloughing off her skin like shucking an ear of corn, ignoring the fact that the copepod had probably already started to eat her.

It takes the combined effort of Peter and Fitzroy to drag Makado up to safety, and it’s only when the three-inch-thick safety shutter seals off access to the lower gastrointestinal zone that she stops screaming Eileen’s name and the tears come, and with her shoulders shaking and her hands trembling, she lets the tears fall on the acid-proof steel until she can cry no more.


	7. Chapter 7

“Fuck,” I say, and Peter stretches, regards me evenly.

“There’s more,” he tells me.

“I want to hear it,” I tell him, “but I’m out of SD cards. I need to put all this shit on my laptop and clear these, make more room.”

“Alright,” Peter shrugs. “Are you going to come back later tonight, or…”

I glance at my phone; it’s already two in the morning. I wince. “Tomorrow?”

“I get off early tomorrow. I’m taking some other people to the Pit.”

“I still don’t get why you do that.”

“It’ll make more sense once I’m done with the story.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I tell him. I look at him and he looks at me. It’s hard to reconcile the Peter I know with the one he’s been telling me about. This one, sitting behind the 7-11 counter, just looks tired.

“You know,” he says after a moment, “you’re more persistent than I thought you would be when I first met you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. When you followed us out there to the fence, I thought you’d get scared. Or at least, when you found out you wouldn’t be able to use this in a story, you’d lose interest.”

“Let’s just say that now I’m personally interested.”

“Personally?”

“Sure. Perhaps ‘invested’ would have been a better word.”

I can see his eyes narrow. He looks at me appraisingly. “You haven’t been feeling it calling to you, have you?”

“I don’t even know what that would feel like. What the hell does that even mean?”

Peter’s silent for a while. “After the disaster, once I was out and convalescing and everything, I started having these dreams. Almost like lucid dreaming, if you know what that is. The most vivid dreams I’ve ever had, and ones where I could actually control what I was doing. You know how in most dreams, you just sort of do what your subconscious wants you to? Well, in these it was almost like being awake. I’d be in these ordinary situations, I’d be in my house or in the hospital or whatever, walking down the street, and I’d turn a corner or open the door and there would just be the Pit, right there.”

“What, the whole thing?”

“No, no, I mean, I’d open the door and all of a sudden it’d be an alveolar passage or the organ trail or something. And I’d feel – I’d feel this pull, almost physical, to go down there, to go into the Pit in these dreams. Like where I was before, it wasn’t right, there was something wrong about it, but when I got to the pit, it’d be right. It’d be okay.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just, you know, trauma?”

“I started missing time.”

“Missing time?”

“I’d wake up and it’d be one or two in the afternoon and I’d be standing on the porch having a smoke, fully dressed, staring out across the desert to where the pit ought to be. I was back in Lubbock with my sister at the time and I’d be pointed straight where Gumption would be, I checked it on a map and everything. Like, one moment I’d be asleep having one of those dreams and the next I’d be in the middle of doing something else.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah. So my sister got worried about me. She thought I was getting into drugs, actually, and when I tried to explain to her what was going on she didn’t buy it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean, it’s reasonable, right? I don’t really blame her for it. Well, I did at the time but now, looking back on…hindsight is 20/20, you know?”

“I feel that,” I murmur.

“Anyway, it got so bad that she had me committed, and from there I sort of ping-ponged around the system for a while until I got to somebody who’d heard of other people who were having the same trouble, who’d all been involved in the Flesh Pit disaster. He managed to get me transferred to a facility over in Dallas that was handling that issue. It was…”

He trails off. I hold my tongue, though I’m dying to know. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.

“It was rough,” he finishes. “There were a lot of people there and they were all in bad shape. I was still only losing a couple of hours a day but there were people who were losing three, four, five. You could tell because they’d walk around just sort of staring blankly, you could tell they were off somewhere else. You could talk to them and they’d just grunt at you or give you short little one-word answers that usually didn’t make a lot of sense. For me, though, what happened was that sensation of things not feeling right, that got worse. I started feeling that all the time.”

“What exactly does that mean, ‘not feeling right?’ Like, how did that feel?”

“Like, okay. Did you ever see one of those optical illusions where it’s supposed to be a three-dimensional object and then the camera moves and it’s actually two-dimensional and just really stretched out so that from one perspective it looks three-d?”

“Yeah.”

“Like that, kind of, but with everything. I’d get afraid that if I’d move, everything would sort of warp out of shape. And then I started to see it actually happen, just for a moment. Or have you ever been really tired and your eyes started having trouble focusing on moving objects or if you moved your head too quickly or whatever? It was like that but all the time. It’s hard to explain.”

“I think I understand.”

“You can see how that might be concerning. How that might affect you.”

“Yes,” I agree. I start to wonder if I’ve felt like that before, over the past couple of days, but I stamp down on the rising head of paranoia before it can get started.

“Anyway. Once the first couple of people tried to escape they really stepped up their efforts. Then there were the suicides.”

I wish, briefly, that I were still recording.

“Once those started, they didn’t know what to do. It’s not like they were really giving us very much freedom to begin with. A bunch of people swallowed their own tongues in their sleep, choked to death that way. I mean, can you imagine the determination it’d take to do that? You’d have to be…you’d have to be crazy.”

“You must have been scared,” I say gently.

“Yeah. So when they had an experimental treatment they wanted to try, I jumped for it.”

“What was it?”

“Some sort of drug, I never knew the name. It was still in trials, I heard. That plus electroconvulsive.”

“Christ.”

“It was rough, but it helped.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Whatever part of me that was still stuck in the Pit and wanting to get back there, that killed it.”

Something in the way he says it makes me shudder. “So that’s it? You’re all better now?”

“I guess. I haven’t had a dream in four years. My imagination’s suffered, I can feel it. You tell me to picture an apple in my head, I can’t do it. I can see a little cartoon apple, maybe, like a scribble.”

“Did your personality change?”

“I guess. My sister said it did. Said I wasn’t as…I dunno. Said I wasn’t ‘me’ any more.”

“Did you feel like you weren’t you?”

“I felt the same. A little less energetic, maybe.”

“Did you resent her?”

“I did at first. When I got an offer from the Containment company out there, to come back and work in the Pit, I thought about it for a long time but eventually I took it. That’s how I came back here. I was scared to begin with, I thought it might start up again, but it was alright. That and I wanted to just get a little space, a little breathing room. Every now and then I think about trying to explain what happened to her but I don’t think she’d understand.”

“Right.”

“I ended up working for the company for a while and then me and the head of security we, ah – we had it out and ever since there’s been a bit of bad blood. I resigned but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the town.”

I think about that for a moment. “You’ve been letting people in for a long time, haven’t you?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Me and – and the head of security, she knew about it, but when I explained it to her she was willing to turn a blind eye. Eventually when that grew…impossible, I left.”

I think about that pronoun for a moment but I don’t ask. It seems like it’s still a fresh wound and I don’t want to prod.

“Why do you let them in?” I ask.

“If you’re at the point that you’re coming down here and practically climbing the fence trying to get to the Pit, you don’t come back from that,” he says. “I’ve seen the reports, the analysis they’ve done on some of those people. There’s a point of no return. I saw a little glimpse of it myself but I got pulled away from that abyss. You fall in, you don’t come out. At that point they’re dead either way but I think it’s a mercy to let them in, to let them die somewhere that they, you know…that doesn’t cause them the same level of pain to exist in. Or maybe to give them a chance to – find whatever they’re looking for.”

He watches me carefully as he says it, but I nod after a moment. It makes sense, at least to me it does. Of course it relies on assumptions, on the assumption that these people can’t be rehabilitated, that the mind is a fragile thing and once broken can’t be fixed, but aren’t those reasonable assumptions? I realize, thinking to myself, that I don’t blame him, I don’t…I don’t know, feel nervous around him, feel like he’s killing people, or purposely murdering them.

If he’s telling me the truth. I look at him; he looks at me. His eyes are sunken but bright. He’s got bags under them but he looks alert, watchful, keen. “Are you telling me the truth?” I ask him, and he smiles, spreads his hands. He has an innocent smile.

“I’m telling you everything,” he says. “It feels good to get it off my chest.”

“Okay,” I tell him, and worry no more.

* * *

We make plans to meet the next day for breakfast, at the little diner a few streets down. It’d looked pretty dead when I’d rolled into town and driven past it but apparently it’s only open until noon. Then I leave the 7-11, the little bell tinkling behind me as I push the door open, and the night air puts its arms around me and I realize just how tired I am.

I blow a breath out. “I have _got_ to stop pushing myself so hard,” I say, and I feel a little twinge of fear in my stomach, because a year ago I wouldn’t have felt like this was even in the same ballpark as ‘pushing myself hard.’

I don’t feel any different, not yet. I don’t feel sick. I suppose I won’t until my immune system deteriorates enough that I’m catching illnesses off of pigeons or something like that. I’d had about fifty tabs worth of frenzied research left on my laptop that I’d impulsively closed when I was packing a few days ago. Now I regret it. I could go into my history, get them back, but I won’t. I already know I won’t.

Ignorance really is bliss. If you can lie to yourself you can say ‘but I didn’t know! Nobody told me!’ and have it be honest. And if it’s honest then it stops being a lie.

I feel like I’m tearing in pieces, a little bit there when I get caught in a doorjamb, a little bit here when someone takes a hold of me and pulls.

Maybe if I make myself empty enough I can just fill myself up with Peter’s story, fill myself up with the Pit, and I won’t have to think.

I smoke a cigarette and then get in the car, drive back to the hotel. I take my clothes off and don’t bother to put any underthings on. I have some night clothes in my bag but I’m too exhausted to bother. Housekeeping’s come by and made the bed so I unmake it, toss the big heavy blanket on the floor, and then I fall in and fall asleep and let no dreams trouble my anxious mind.

* * *

My eyes fly open and then flash over to my watch, and then my lip curls. “I am getting so fucking tired,” I say out loud, “of being woken up by goddam phone calls.”

It’s the hotel phone this time. I don’t recognize the number. I consider letting it ring but then sigh and pick it up. “Hello?” I ask, hoping my voice is aggressively drowsy enough to make whoever is on the other end reconsider.

“Hello, Miss Dzilenski,” says the voice, low, cool, feminine. It sounds familiar. “This is Erica Walken.”

Oh.

“Well,” I say, “you pronounced my name correctly, so I suppose I ought to at least hear you out.”

I can hear her smiling when she speaks. “My grandmother was Polish,” she says. “Doesn’t it mean something like ‘one who comes from the green place?’”

I open my mouth, then shut it again. “Yes,” I say finally. “That’s true. I never learned any Polish but I remember my father telling me that’s what it meant.”

“I’m afraid you might have gotten the wrong impression of me,” she says. I grunt.

“I suppose you could say that.”

“I’m calling to warn you.”

I roll my eyes. “Please,” I say, “it’s way, way too early for the melodrama.”

Erica pauses for a moment. “I don’t know what Peter’s told you about me,” she says, “but you have to realize, the…trips he organizes wouldn’t be possible without cooperation between the two of us.”

“You mean the – “

Erica clears her throat, interrupting me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I think we cut out for a moment. The phone lines here can be unreliable.”

I stop for a moment and think about that, think about what I might be getting myself into. “Alright,” I say. “I get it. What’s your warning?”

“When you meet him for breakfast, Peter’s going to offer you something.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t accept it.”

“Okay, can you like, go a little more in depth with the –“

The line clicks dead. I look at the receiver for a while before I put it down and walk, still naked, into the bathroom, to piss and bathe and shave and smoke another five cigarettes in the shower again.

“She said not to accept, huh?”

“Yeah,” I nod. Peter shakes his head. His pancakes are getting cold so I reach over, cut myself a slice of one of them, pull it back over to my plate. He stares at me and I shrug. “What?” I ask. “You’re obviously not going to eat them.”

“Erica and I have a…complicated relationship.”

I put the voice recorder on the table, click it on. Up until now we’ve been making small talk while I’ve been wondering what goes on inside his head, while I’ve been wondering just how much of him the doctors killed in that psychiatric ward four years ago. He certainly seems like a person. He doesn’t seem dull or slow. If he hadn’t told me all that had happened I would never have suspected that there were anything different. Perhaps the worst I’d say was that he was boring. But plenty of people are boring.

“Tell me about the cult,” I say.

“I don’t even think ‘cult’ is really the right word for it. They just get together, have some pseudo-mystical rituals and habits, and then, you know, the whole thing about having to go down to the Pit and stay for a while as an initiation. But basically they think that the Pit is God, or just a god, or just a higher power. You ever go to Al-anon?”

“Alcoholics Anonymous?”

“No, Al-anon. It’s different. Don’t ask me to explain how, I don’t know. Never went myself. I knew a guy who led a group, one time. One of the things they do as part of their process is you have to acknowledge a higher power. Not god necessarily, just a higher power. ‘God as you understand him,’ I think is the phrasing. You could see god in a tornado, or a hurricane, or even something like a snake. If a snake bites you and you don’t get to a hospital, you’re dead. Well, okay, I guess it depends on the kind of snake. You get what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been to a few of their meetings. They have them in the gym of the local high school.”

“There’s a high school?”

“Not much of one, but it’s there. Believe it or not Gumption isn’t completely dead.”

“Guess I didn’t pass it on the way in.”

“Probably not. It’s on the outskirts of town.”

“Anyway. The meetings.”

“There’s nothing really creepy about them. Just a bunch of people who’ve gone through trauma of some kind and are coping by using the Pit as an example of a higher power. I guess it’s just more tangible than whatever Al-anon uses.”

“Really?”

“Really. The only trouble is, they’ve gotten a little…protective of the Pit. We do occasionally get tourists who want to gawk and some determined people occasionally who want to get in. Not the ones who’re compelled to, I mean, people who want to see what it’s like, for the thrill, or because they want to hurt the Pit. Whatever. Lots of motivations. You can understand how a cult like that might feel.”

“So that’s it?”

“Well, there’s also all the weird sex stuff, but I think that’s just because Erica’s into it.”

“What?”

He waves his hand dismissively. “It’s nothing strange, really. They take a field trip down to the ballast bulbs every now and then. They have to be very careful cause it’s so close to the new control center they - the Company - put in there, but I keep track of things for them, coordinate it so they go in and out during a shift change or on a weekend when there’s a skeleton crew. You, uh…”

He trails off and I look at him. His eyes flick up to mine and then away again. “When I told you what ballast was before I could tell you…knew what it does. I don’t know what your experience was but I guess it was something formative. I –“

“I lost my virginity cause of a Coke Heartthrob.”

Something about the way he blushes when I say it makes me want to smile. “Okay. Well, there were studies suggesting that some of the Indian tribes around here a long time ago, the ballast was a pretty important part of their rituals. Fertility, rite of passage, all that stuff. Erica just kind of cribbed off of them, I guess.”

“They knew about the Pit?”

“Oh yeah. There were ritual grounds there when it was discovered that dated back a very long time, least that’s what I heard. Got almost entirely obliterated in the initial excavations. They didn’t care as much about that kind of thing in the 70s.”

“That’s sad.”

“Erica’s of the opinion,” Peter says, “that the exploitation of the Pit is a perversion of the way people used to live with it. She thinks that people used to live in harmony with it, and that turning it into a theme park was…crass. And that Anodyne got what it deserved.”

I think about that for a moment. “She must not really think of the Pit as a god, then,” I reason. “A god you _can_ exploit isn’t one.”

“You’d have to take that up with her.”

“Are they dangerous?”

He thinks about that one for a moment. “I think there are one or two individuals among them who could be, some of the newer crop who really drink the kool-aid. I don’t think Erica would be, though, not personally at least. I think she thinks the Pit can take care of itself, it’s really the newer members who’re the most zealous.”

“Alright. So what’s the offer I’m supposed to be turning down?”

Peter’s mouth quirks up in a repressed smile. “Want to come to the Pit tonight?”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Dead serious. I can get you in. The group I’m taking is small, just three other people. One more won’t make a difference. And I can get you back out again.”

I realize that I’ve opened my mouth to say no automatically. I think about it for a moment. “You’ve been doing this for how long?”

“Three years. Give or take.”

“Ever gotten caught?”

“If I had I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“What if tonight’s the night, then?”

“I thought you wanted this scoop.”

I laugh at that. “Can I bring my camcorder, then?”

“Sure. Don’t know how useful it’ll be at night, though.”

“It has a night vision mode. Not a very good one but better than nothing.”

“So you’re in?”

This is it, Roan. Last chance to back out. You could get back in your rental car and turn around and drive back to Lubbock, catch a plane home tonight.

“I’m in,” I tell him. He grins at me and I feel for a moment like I’m back in high school, making a plan to do some dumb shit with Joe and Mac and Lou and all the rest. Christ, I haven’t thought about them in ages. I – wait a minute.

“Hey,” I ask, “what about Erica, though?”

“What about her?”

“What’s she going to do if I do go with?”

“Nothing,” Peter tells me. He seems confident enough. “What can she do? Rat us out? Then she and the cult won’t be able to get to the Pit any more. I do more than just lift up a fake rock, you know, I’ve still got a couple of friends on the inside, and they let me know about patrols, shift changes, all that stuff. That’s the reason they can’t do it without me.”

“You really don’t take any money from the people you let in?”

“I don’t take money from the people who’re drawn to it,” he elaborates. “They get in for free. The cult has to pay.”

“Ah,” I say. “That’s your angle.”

“I’m not making a ton of money from it,” he says. “But it’s still a risk, you know, and I really don’t want to take money from the other people I let in.”

“I’m not judging you,” I assure him. “You don’t have to justify yourself to me.”

“I just don’t want to give you the wrong impression.”

“How much do I have to pay, then?”

“What? You don’t have to –“

“I’m serious. Pretend I’m with the cult, or I’m a thrillseeker who managed to convince you to let me in with my feminine wiles and my good looks,” I say, batting my eyelashes at him. I manage, very narrowly, not to feel silly while doing it. He’s looking at me very closely and I realize, perhaps belatedly, that the shirt I wore today does show rather a lot of my meager cleavage. What if…no, forget it. “How much would you charge me? Be honest, no friends and family discount.”

I can see his eyes flick upwards and meet mine. He was staring at them, he must have been. It was only for the briefest of moments but he must have been.

I bite my lip. Stop it, Roan. “How much?” I ask again. He takes a long sip of his coffee. “Maybe seventy-five bucks.”

“Maybe?”

“Price depends on how much of a liability I think you are. You seem pretty solid to me so you get a lower price.”

“Cash only, I assume?”

“Does it look like I carry a card reader?”

“I’ll have to go by an ATM but I’ll have it for tonight. When should I meet you? And where?”

“You don’t have to –“

“If you’re going to take me in there, I’m paying.”

He looks like he’s going to argue with me and I raise my eyebrows at him. “Don’t start,” I warn him, and he puts his hands up and relents.

I order another plate of eggs and while we’re waiting he tells me where and when to meet him. I can feel a little ratty knot of excitement in my belly, and despite everything, despite how I’ve been feeling the past couple of days, I grin at him like I can’t contain myself.

“You look excited,” he observes.

“I _am_ excited,” I tell him. “Do you have enough time to finish your story?”

He checks his watch, glances at my voice recorder. “Did you bring enough memory cards this time?”

“I’ve got plenty.”

So he tells me.

* * *

“Mak, it isn’t your fault,” Peter tells her, and though he can’t see, Makado rolls her eyes at him, still hunched over on the ground. She curls upright, wipes her eyes, sniffs loudly. Tyler and Fitzroy still look like they’re in shock.

“I know it isn’t my fault,” she says softly. “I’m not sad, I’m pissed. Okay, yeah, I’m sad, but I’m more pissed than sad.”

Peter looks at her, at the long wet streaks still there on her cheeks, at her wide eyes, reddened from crying. He watches her blush and as she starts to say something, starts to turn away and wipe at her cheeks again, he reaches out to her and folds her into his arms and after a moment she puts her arms around him as well and breathes there against his chest. He can feel her take a long, shuddering breath and blow it out, and then her fingernails curl inwards and dig at his back lightly, sending a delicious tingle up his spine, even though he tries to will it away, tries to tell himself that now isn’t the time.

He feels Makado’s lips come together and press a soft kiss into the space just between his pectorals and his heart makes a funny soaring motion like it’s going to leap out of his chest. He looks down at Makado and she looks up at him. “Let’s go back down and kill that fucking thing,” she says.

“Mak, no.”

“You and me could do it,” she breathes. There is a fire in her eyes that he’s never seen before, not even the time when she locked that rapist out in the depths of the Pit and let him disappear. There’s something different, something about Eileen that’s making her blood boil and choke and singe her as it throbs through her veins. “We could go down to the LVC, get one of those big slug guns, get back into gastro –“

“Gastro’s a wreck,” Peter tells her. “That copepod is probably long gone by now. And even if it wasn’t, how would we be able to tell it was the same one?”

“It’ll have scoring on its exoskeleton, from the acid. It’ll look mottled.”

“And what about them?” he asks, nodding to Tyler and Fitzroy. He hasn’t seen Fitzroy crying but his eyes are red, so he must have been. Tyler’s lip keeps trembling. Makado looks over at them and as Peter watches he can see the tears come rising again and watches as she swallows them back down. “We have to get them out, Mak,” he tells her, reaching down and, greatly daring, taking her hand in his. Her hand is small and warm and soft, and he holds it delicately, as though it were a butterfly he’d caught by the wing and instead of panicking and fluttering madly to get away, it had held still and let him examine it. Then Makado grins at him through her tears and knots her fingers in his, running her thumb along the fleshy heel of his palm in a series of quick circles before she breaks from him, leaving him a little dazed and smelling of peaches. She reaches out and thumps her fist into Peter’s chest.

“You’re awful,” she tells him.

“Me?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m trying to feel sad and angry, and you’re making that difficult.”

“That’s what you keep me around for.”

“Alright,” she says. “We’ll get them out first, and then come back down.”

“Mak…”

“I know,” she says, making a face. “I promised these kids I would get them out. What about Eileen?”

“You cannot blame yourself for that.”

“I don’t, I blame the copepod.”

“And killing it is going to make things even?”

Makado is silent for a long time. “No,” she says finally. “But it’ll make me feel better.”

“Mak, please.”

She looks at him again, her gaze oddly calculating, and then, after what feels like forever, smiles. “Okay,” she says.

* * *

Getting out is easier than Peter had thought it would be. Bronchial is practically deserted; very few creatures live up here, and the passageways are twisting and confusing, making it a seldom-visited spot for tourists, meaning the main traffic was mostly rangers taking shortcuts and maintenance crews doing spot work. The central passageway, though, a relic of the old Anodyne days of the 70s, was their ticket out – a vast bloody hallway carving through the twisting alveolar passages of the Pit’s enormous lungs, without any regard for the damage it might have been doing to the Pit, large enough to drive a utility vehicle down and long enough to span almost the entirety of the Park’s sizable width. There had long been talks about closing the passageway and removing its supports and retaining stents and allowing the Pit to heal, but after a series of studies in the late 90s, Anodyne decided to keep the passage open, as the Pit had already grown around it and over it, covering the hallway in a living tube of flesh that flexed and squeezed with the Pit’s labored breathing.

The Pit’s lungs don’t work like those of a mammal. Some of the principles are the same – maximum surface area for maximum oxygen absorption. But just like the Pit’s circulatory system, the lungs draw in a constant influx of air, and expel a constant outflow of carbon dioxide and other waste chemicals – no regular pulse of breathing. More efficient that way, or so a scientist had told Peter at some point. The air comes in, through the gullet and through other smaller orifices dotted here and there across the Texas plains, and the air vents out likewise through other orifices entirely. And one of these orifices, a small, puckered, fleshy hole, protruding through meters of rock and earth, clenching down to roughly eight feet in diameter at its smallest, is located just on the other side of what most tourists consider to be the Pit – the low sloping depression in the earth with the excavated surface of the Permian Basin Superorganism laid bare to the sun, with the vast cabled dilating paddles holding it open, with the gondola lift from the Upper Visitor Center to the elevator in the center of the Gullet, and from there down to the Lower Visitor Center.

It takes them an agonizing half-hour in the bronchial canals, following barely-legible signs that were never really intended to be used. The breathing orifice was nominally listed as an emergency exit but as a cost-cutting measure, it was never actually used as one. That means no running lights, no flooring or stents, just plain raw Pit tissue and Makado’s flashlight beam passing over wet, pale, veined bronchial folds. It takes them an agonizing half-hour, pausing every few minutes to wait for the breeze, make sure it’s still blowing in the direction they’re going, doubling back and forth and over again, pressing in and out gently as though the Pit were sucking at them, trying to keep them inside, but they make it. Makado bursts out of the orifice as though she were never happier to see a night sky and fresh air, pulling Peter out after her, tugging him by the arm as though she wants to pull it from its socket. He clambers, stumbling, out of the orifice, and then realizes that Makado has dropped his hand and is standing, mouth agape, fingers twined in the chain-link fence around the breathing hole, staring down at the chaos below them. The Upper Visitor Center has been cracked open and the entire western half of it has collapsed into a pile of rubble. Helicopters, at least a dozen, are circling above, and a convoy of military and police vehicles is still streaming into the park; from their vantage point Peter can see the line stretching out along the main road for at least a mile. They can smell the stench of gastric ejecta, sharp and acrid, they can see great green smears of it along with vast piles of off-white pale chyma, frilled and bulbous and disgusting, scattered here and there as though they’d been dropped from the sky. And there, amid the piles and the streaming swarms of paramedics and rangers and police and National Guard troopers, scurrying back and forth on nameless errands amid the sheer destruction of the surface, Peter can make out the supine carcasses of three copepods, enormous ones, their thoraxes blown open from forty-mill fire. People are taking photographs, loading bodies onto stretchers, people are performing CPR, guests are wandering around, dazed and confused, until someone in some sort of uniform collars them and pushes them towards one of the great hospital tents they’ve set up here and there, their white cloth shining like beacons in the moonlight.

Peter looks at Makado and she looks at Peter, and then she reaches out and takes his hand, and they open the gate in the fence and make their way down amid the chaos towards the nearest hospital tent.

* * *

Peter’s seen a dozen people he knows but they’ve all looked busy and, all things considered, it doesn’t look like there’s any sort of roll call or place to check in, so he’s just let them rush past on whatever errands they’re set to do. He saw Bruce getting wheeled past in a stretcher, acid burns down his side, screaming; he saw a guest, a girl, probably about the same age as Eileen, pale as a ghost, staring into nothing while a paramedic zipped her into a body bag. All these visions and more flicker past like something out of a dream. He loses hold of Makado’s hand at some point, but he doesn’t notice; everywhere he looks he sees something awful so he stops looking. He fixes his eyes on the field hospital and puts his arms around Fitzroy and Tyler’s shoulders and keeps them with him, holds them tight so they don’t get buffeted away from him in the crowd.

When they’re almost there he turns. “Hey, Mak,” he starts, but then he stops.

Makado isn’t behind them. Fitzroy and Tyler turn with him and Peter can feel his heart thumping in his chest and he realizes he’s afraid. He cranes his neck and looks for her but he can’t see her anywhere, but there are so many people and she’s short enough that he wouldn’t be able to to begin with. Fitzroy looks at Tyler and then nudges Peter. “We’re just going to go get checked out at the hospital,” he says. Peter glances over at them, and then over at the hospital. Fitzroy takes Tyler and walks away, walks towards the tent. Before they make it to the entrance, they turn back. Peter watches Tyler’s mouth move, sees him mouth the words ‘thank you.’ Fitzroy waves and Peter waves back, and then a man in a National Guard uniform leans in and blocks the kids from view, and then ushers them into the hospital, and Peter is alone.

When he turns back around he looks out, past the crowd, and up along the hilly expanse they’d come from. A helicopter whizzes by, its spotlight drawing a bright trace along the ground, and Peter sees someone in a dirty ranger uniform climbing back up the hill, no helmet covering her curly brown hair, still pulled back in a ponytail, her gloves held between her teeth as she reaches up barehanded to steady herself on the face of the hill above her.

When Peter finally makes it back there he finds the gate to the breathing orifice ajar, and no trace of Makado, but it’s alright, he tells himself. She might have a head start but he knows where she’s going. And he knows he can pull her back out of the Pit, if she’ll let him.


	8. Chapter 8

The first time he met Makado had been in 2002. She’d come in as a new recruit, fresh out of college, fresh out of ranger training classes, no idea what she’d been getting herself into at the Pit. She’d drawn what was regarded universally as one of the worst assignments there – Pleasure Domes. The Domes were a series of ballast bulbs that had long been the Pit’s biggest draw, the aphrodisiac panacea flowing through the Domes’ stretched-tight skin invigorating and exciting generations of parkgoers for decades, from the old Anodyne days to now, in 2007. Most of the baths were diluted heavily, but even at a 5% concentration, the ballast could get your heart pumping. One of the perks of the job was free access to the Domes on certain days, as well as after hours – a perk Peter had never indulged in heavily, but some of his colleagues certainly did.

Although being one of the most heavily regulated and scrutinized aspects of the Pit, and despite having numerous rangers and attendants assigned to the baths, especially the deeper, adult-only ones with less diluted ballast, it seemed that hardly a day went by without some sort of issue. Sexual assault in the Viribus Bath, someone throwing up in Regia, a particularly rotund guest getting stuck in “Lovers’ Squeeze,” a tiny macrobacterium the size of a golf ball getting into the main bath and everyone freaking the fuck out when a five-year-old decided to grab it and pop it into his mouth, whatever the issue might have been, it was exhausting, and the meager bump in pay you got for working the Baths was almost universally regarded as being capital-letter Not Worth It.

Peter had been in the break room at Ranger Station 12, the one closest to the baths and a haven for exhausted rangers and bath personnel trying to get a safe haven from guests. He’d been doing tour groups for a week and always stopped in at this station to eat lunch because it was just far enough away from the LVC that he could extend his break for another five or ten minutes or so and have nobody bat an eye at it. He’d been in the middle of his sandwich, reading a newspaper someone had left at the table, when a short, curly-haired blur had stormed into the break room practically smoldering with rage, eyes locked on Bruce, the Head Ranger in charge of the baths at the time. Peter had glanced up as the door banged open, as had everyone else, and had noticed with faint amusement that as soon as he saw the slender woman standing in the doorframe Bruce had already paled slightly beneath his rugged tan.

“Bruce,” Makado had said, her voice remarkably even, “you’re a hard man to track down.”

Peter’s eyes had lingered on the dusty scattering of freckles across her high, full cheeks, and then had flicked over to Bruce; their eyes had met for only a split second and then Bruce had looked away, back at Makado. “Miss Veret,” he’d said in his gravelly voice, “we’ve already discussed –“

“What we had was not a discussion. You leaving me a voice mail while I’m asleep and then avoiding me so you don’t have to deal with me doesn’t count as a discussion.”

“Miss Veret,” he said again, glancing around at the five or so other rangers in the break room. “Is this really a discussion you want to have right now?”

“Apparently!” she said. “Cause if you give me a date and time to have it in private, your track record with that isn’t so good right now!”

“Miss –“

“Don’t ‘Miss Veret’ me. I called you on the dot every time you told me to, and you let me go to voicemail, and then you never called me back. You ignored the emails I sent you, you made sure you were out of your office whenever I went down there –“

Bruce, to Peter’s great surprise, flushes, an angry dull red filling his tanned cheeks. “Alright, Makado,” he said. “Fine. What did you want to ask me?”

“Why didn’t you approve my promotion?”

“I believe the reason is stated on the –“

“Bruce.”

He looked at her again and sighed. “Because I do not have confidence in your ability to adequately control guests in the Baths below level 4.”

Makado, if it were possible, grew even angrier. “Why?” she asked. Peter could practically feel the heat coming off her in waves. “Because I’m a woman?”

“No,” Bruce said quickly. “Of course not.”

“Because of some sort of flaw in my character?”

“That isn’t how I’d put it.”

“How would you put it, then?”

Peter knew, of course, the reason Bruce didn’t give her a promotion. There’s a reason that only particularly large and burly individuals end up working the baths below level 4, and because, due to the nature of human beings attempting to become large and burly, the detail must be something like ninety percent men – those baths hold the highest concentrations of ballast in the entire park, all the way down to the Libido Bath, which, Peter recalls, has a concentration close to seventy percent.

Imagine the average man, hopped up on an aphrodisiac so powerful that it is literally illegal to sell or obtain outside of one particular area in the Mystery Flesh Pit, who in typical pigheaded American fashion has assumed that all of the cautions and warnings and advice he’s received in regards to the baths below level 4 do not apply to him, who assumes that because he is a red-blooded American man he will be able to handle it, and then discovers that his girlfriend, equally as unprepared for the heady mixture of hormones rampaging through her veins, would much rather lay with someone else down there in the Libido Bath, somebody more muscular or attractive or who just smells better, whose pheromones mix with hers in just the right way to drive her crazy and make her forget about the poor guy she’s supposed to be with. This was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it?

There’s a reason the rangers down there wear separate air supplies, why they have to take regular breaks, why they get rotated between baths so that they have a chance to breathe normal air that isn’t thick with the stench of sex and ballast.

“I want that extra five dollars an hour,” Makado told Bruce. “I’ve passed every test, I can handle it,” she said.

Ah. Of course. That would be why.

To be fair, the tests, especially the willpower and hand to hand ones, are fairly difficult. Peter hadn’t taken them himself but he’d heard stories from rangers who had and a few, particularly the ex-Marines, assured him that the tests were nothing to sneeze at. If she’d managed to pass them…

Bruce looked at Makado, all five feet and two or so inches of her, and sighed again. “I’m trying to protect you,” he told her.

“So this is because I’m a woman.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“You’re afraid that I’m going to end up getting raped by somebody twice my size and muscle mass and then I’ll sue the park.”

Bruce spread his hands, shrugged at her, looked her from head to toe. “Surely you can understand why I might be concerned about that.”

“I passed the hand-to-hand test! I –“

“You don’t get the position just by passing tests.”

“Yes you do. Tell me where it says you don’t. You apply, and then you get invited to take the tests, and if you pass you get the job.”

“I have veto power, Miss Veret. And I’m exercising it. You don’t get the job. Now stop bothering me.”

Bruce got up and then pushed past Makado, headed out the door. Peter had watched the slender girl’s hands clench and unclench reflexively while Bruce was speaking, and had been wondering if she was going to get mad enough to do something stupid, and then she did.

As Bruce, all of the hulking 250 pounds of him, bodybuilder physique and calves the size of Christmas hams, brushed roughly past her on his way out the door, Makado moved quick as lightning and, in a move that Peter heard described later on, informally, as ‘some kind of kung fu bullshit,’ had Bruce down on one knee in a sleeper choke. Peter could tell she was only holding it loosely, not actually choking him, but he saw Bruce blink. Again their eyes met, just a coincidence from the angle. Then Bruce got to his feet, hoisting Makado off the floor in one swift motion, still clinging to his neck in the chokehold, and reached behind himself with one arm and plucked her off of his back like a cat picking up a kitten. Makado’s eyes were wide, and as Bruce held her there, one-handed, for just a moment longer than he ought to have, Peter saw Makado cringe back lightly, as though she were anticipating a slap or a punch. Instead Bruce set her on the floor and bent down, got in her face like a drill instructor.

“You are not strong enough,” he told her. “You will never be strong enough. It isn’t your fault, and you have tried admirably hard, but it. is. not. good. enough.”

Then Bruce left, and everybody in the break room except for Peter realized that they had other important tasks they really ought to have been attending to, and then it was Peter and Makado, alone, Peter still too dazed by all that had happened in the last five minutes to have made his escape when everyone else had. He saw Makado, standing alone in the middle of the break room, facing the door, her shoulders shaking quietly, and then he did the only thing that made any sort of sense at the time, which was to take out the small packet of tissues he kept in his backpack and offer them to her, and she took them and blew her nose and wiped her eyes and then sat down and put her head in her hands for a while while Peter went back to his newspaper and the rest of his sandwich and the potato salad he had packed that day.

“So how much of a fool did I make of myself?” Makado had asked after a while, after she’d composed herself. Peter had put down the newspaper and shrugged.

“Well, physically assaulting your boss is probably not the best way to get a promotion.”

Makado laughed, a little sharp on the edges but still with some mirth to it. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve always had a bad temper, and the way he was talking to me…”

“I don’t blame you. I thought it was really fucking impressive you got him into a sleeper like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Guy that big? And I mean, you know…”

“I’m little, I know,” Makado had said, and she’d smiled at Peter, and ever since then he’d been a little bit in love but he’d never known how to express it.

Then Makado’s face had fallen. “But he’s right,” she’d said. “I’m not strong enough. It was just because he wasn’t prepared for me that I was able to do that. I couldn’t keep him in that position even if I was really choking him.” “I don’t know if –“

“But in a real situation I’d have a stunner, I’d have a gun, I’d have all this shit. And how many people do you know that are as _big_ as Bruce is?” Her eyes, brown flecked with green, had flashed up to him as he’d started speaking. “What’s your name?”

“Peter.”

“I’m Makado.”

“Did you really pass the tests?”

“Flying colors,” she’d said, a little bit of pride in her voice. “The willpower one was tough but I did it.”

“What even is the willpower test?”

“Can’t tell you,” she winked, and Peter felt his heart throb a little in his chest. “You tell, you’re out of consideration.”

“So people can’t prepare for it, I assume.”

“Correct. But I did it, and then that _fucker_ denies me just because I’m small…and now I’m probably going to lose my job because I got mad. Fuck.”

Peter thought about his next words carefully. “I’ve known Bruce for a while now and I do think he really was just trying to protect you. He’s a stand-up guy. I don’t think it’s like…he has a grudge on you, or something like that.”

Makado thought about that for a bit. “Have you ever had anybody try to protect you? Try to stop you from doing something you know you _can_ do because they don’t believe in you?”

“I don’t think I have, actually.”

“Well, it sucks.”

And then Makado had risen suddenly and looked at Peter. “I have to go back to work,” she said. “Walk with me?”

And even though Peter still had a half hour left on his break, he had grinned at her and told her that he’d love to.

When Peter had transferred over to the Campground Makado had ended up doing the same, and then it had been a fantastic two years of riffing off of each other and making fun of Carl and going to bars after work and hanging out every now and then at Makado’s little apartment or at Peter’s house or at Carl’s place and getting stoned and watching movies or playing video games or whatever else they could think of that sounded like a laugh. Makado and Carl had hooked up a couple times, Peter knew, and it had filled him with something like sadness that he’d dealt with by stuffing it far back down inside of himself and being happy for them instead, and then Carl had hurt her somehow and he’d been the one she’d come to cry to, and he felt closer to her for it, and then they’d all made up and everything had been happy.

Until July 4th, of course. Until Makado got that promotion she’d always been after and left him and Carl behind, long enough for Peter to realize that he didn’t actually like Carl all that much and Carl, he could tell, even though they had never spoke of it, felt likewise. He could just tell.

Peter pushes his way out of the bronchial folds. He pops his helmet and then bends over, puts his hands on his knees, takes a breather. The air is, ironically, fresher here at this end. He straightens up after a while and makes his way out to the corridor, looks down it both ways, as though hoping to see Makado down at the end, but of course it’s deserted, as he knew it would be. He wonders briefly whether or not she figured he would follow her and, if she did, whether or not she would try to evade him, and then shrugs. She’s coming back to kill the copepod, or at least try to, and to do that she’ll need one of the big slug guns from the LVC. And the quickest way to get to the LVC from bronchial is…

Peter taps his map for a few moments, then grins. Bingo. She _has_ to be there. He hustles off down the corridor, not bothering to consider what he’ll do if she isn’t.

* * *

He can hear Makado before he can see her, the sound of her strenuous grunts echoing round the corner before he turns it. He breaks out of his jog and rounds the corner and sees her there, tugging fruitlessly at the access door to the LVC, another one of the old Anodyne-era doors with a submarine-style locking wheel on it. This one, evidently, hasn’t been maintained as well as it should have been. Her hair is lank with sweat and effort and as Peter watches he can see her shoulders heaving as she takes deep breaths, can see her muscles strain as she pulls on it, as she puts her leg up onto the door to give her more leverage. She slips and falls backwards and lays there on the floor of the corridor. “Fuck!” she yells, her voice breathless.

“Mak!” Peter calls, and she jumps, twists around on the floor and looks at him, then flops back down and waves a half-hearted hand.

“Hey,” she says. “I guess I should have known you’d figure out what I was doing.”

Peter sits on the floor next to her and then after a moment lies down fully. Makado scoots a little closer when he does so that their shoulders are touching. “You doing okay?”

She blows a breath out. “You tell me,” she says.

“Looks like you’re having trouble with that door there.”

“Maybe a little bit.”

“Trying to head down to the LVC?”

“Might have been.”

“You know it slipped down the –“

“- down the gullet, yes, I’m aware.”

“So how were you going to get down there?”

“I’ve got pitons and a climbing kit, I was going to rappel down.”

Peter looks over at her and sees her watching him, eyes bright in the dull emergency lights of the corridor. “What if you fell?”

“Then I’d probably die.”

“And this is worth that? Killing that copepod is worth dying over?”

Makado grunts out a small, humorless laugh. “Is this the part where I say yes and you try to convince me that I’m wrong?”

“I don’t want you to die.”

“Why? Because I kissed you? And who says I’m going to die? You don’t think I can do it?”

“Because you’re my best friend and if you died when I could have stopped you it would tear me apart,” he says, realizing it’s true just while he says it. “Because I’m selfish and I want more of you in my life, I want to kiss you more too I guess but even if you had never kissed me earlier I’d still not want you to go, I’d still want you to just drop it and come back and walk away.”

“If I walk away Eileen died for nothing.”

“Mak, you barely knew her. I’m not trying to be insensitive, but it’s the truth. You barely knew her. Why is this so important?”

Makado puts a hand over her face, then slips her arm down, lets her elbow rest across her eyes. She reaches out blindly with her other hand and finds Peter’s after a moment, then links her fingers with his. Her palm is warm and sweaty but the back of her hand is soft and smooth. Peter runs his thumb over it in slow concentric circles, wishing briefly that his hands weren’t quite so calloused.

“When I was younger,” Makado says softly, “my mother died and left me and my sister alone. My father wasn’t in the picture. I had to grow up pretty fast and it didn’t leave me with a lot of time for myself.”

She pauses there and just breathes for a while; Peter thinks of saying something but instead just squeezes her hand gently. He sees Makado’s lips quirk upwards in a tiny smile beneath her elbow, and Peter bites his lip to keep himself from smiling as well. She shifts her elbow slightly and peeks out at him. “You sure you want me to tell you this story?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Maybe you’d think of me differently.”

“I’ve known you for like three years, even if you have some dark secret in your past it’s not going to change what I think of your character.”

Makado laughs. She rolls over and props herself up on her elbow, then quickly thinks better of it as the harsh metal grating bites at her and ends up rolling further over and tucking herself around Peter. She smells like sweat but he can still detect an undertone of peaches, just like before. The mixture isn’t entirely unpleasant. “I wish,” Makado says, her face very close to Peter’s, “that just for like, half an hour, I could magically transform into a man and have the world be so much _simpler_ for a little bit.”

“I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be an insult.”

“It’s not,” she says. Peter opens his mouth to say something else but Makado leans in and kisses him again. Peter finds himself holding her tightly to him, his hands massaging the coarse backside of her ranger suit. He can feel the thin outline of the wide band of her sports bra beneath his hands. When Makado breaks apart from him she laughs, sitting up and running a hand through her hair. “You’re such a gentleman.”

Peter grunts at her intelligently. She laughs. “Grab my ass, idiot. I know you want to.”

“I’m not going to –“

“Oh my god.”

“Alright, fine.”

“Mm. Better?”

“Yeah.”

“You still want me to tell you about - ?”

“Just tell me. If it’ll make you feel better.”

“Maybe a little. I won’t feel like I’m keeping a secret from you.”

“I’m not going to think about you differently,” he says. Makado shifts backwards a little and Peter feels her taut muscles shift beneath his hands.

“You’re sweet,” she tells him. “Basically, we had to take care of ourselves. I was legally an “adult,” but have you ever met an eighteen-year-old who had her shit together? Who you’d trust to take care of someone else?”

“No,” he admits.

“Exactly,” Makado says. “Because even though you can vote, you’re still a shithead who doesn’t know anything about the real world, and you don’t know you don’t know. So I got a job, a shit one, but enough to take care of my sister and pay rent and put food on the table. All I had was a high school diploma, I was going to go to college but all of a sudden, boom, no money for that, no time for that, I have to take care of my sister.”

“How old was she?”

“Thirteen,” she says. “So we do that for a while and we’re managing but I am not particularly happy with the arrangement because we’re both unhappy, we never liked each other very much to begin with, but I guess it…became obvious to her that I resented her for changing my life.”

“You had a fight and you said something you regretted,” Peter predicts, and Makado laughs, then reaches down and slaps him on the cheek very gently. He squeezes her ass harder and Makado wriggles against him.

“This is supposed to be a sad story,” she tells him. “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.”

“You’re the one putting me in a situation where I can’t take it seriously. Do you want to get up and tell the story?”

“No, it’s nice like this. I still think that you’re going to think of me differently. I don’t know if I want to tell you.”

“But if you don’t tell me now whatever I imagine it is is going to be ten times worse than whatever really happened.”

“I couldn’t handle the responsibility so I abandoned her into the loving arms of the foster system when I got a letter telling me that I’d been selected for a scholarship.”

Makado looks at Peter and Peter looks at Makado. He takes his hand off of her ass and rests it on her hip instead. He can feel the hipbone like a jutting blade against his palm. “Okay,” he says.

“That’s it? Okay?”

Peter thinks about what to say for a moment. “I have heard of people doing much worse to family members,” he says slowly. “And although I don’t think it was necessarily a good thing to have done, I can understand _why_ you did it.”

“Mm,” Makado grunts, reaching for Peters hand and placing it back on her ass. “I suppose that’s as much as I can ask for.”

“What ended up happening to your sister?”

“She hates my guts. I send her some money every now and then to keep her head above water. She’s twenty now, she’s a barista somewhere in Nevada.”

“Very specific.”

“She doesn’t tell me where exactly. I thought I’d managed to, you know, move past it and not let my guilt define me, but then Eileen had to go and get herself eaten by a copepod…” Makado grumbles.

“She reminded you of your sister?”

“Yeah. Of the sister I could have had if I’d kept my shit together for a couple of years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too. I spent a long time being sorry.”

The Pit rocks beneath them lightly and Makado drops down onto Peter’s chest, holding him tightly, but the shudder and the Pit’s moans pass quickly.

“I think I understand,” Peter says once it’s quieted, “why you want to kill that copepod.”

“It’s a pretty simple motivation.”

“You want to kill it because it’ll make up for you taking care of your sister when you failed to before.”

“Boy, you really know what to say to get a girl in the mood,” Makado says.

“I’m sorry, I –“

“I am going to have to teach you how to talk to women, I see,” Makado breathes. Peter can feel her lips moving against the skin of his neck, past his open collar. Her teeth come together and he jumps and he feels Makado smile. “Thinking of me any differently yet?”

“No,” he breathes, but he doesn’t breathe properly and his voice comes out funny and Makado laughs and kisses him on his neck and his cheek and his lips.

“You really don’t think of me any differently at all, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I don’t know if that makes you crazy or me crazy. Maybe we’re both crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Oh, you must be the crazy one, then. Help me with this damn suit.”

“What are you doing with - ?”

“I’m taking it off, you idiot.”

“Why are – oh. _Here_?”

“Why the hell not? This night has been shitty enough so far, I need a pick-me-up.”

“What if –“

“Please do not ‘what-if’ your way out of this, Pete.”

Then Peter’s mind finally catches up with what his body has been urging him towards somewhat exasperatedly and he reaches up and he unzips the front of Makado’s ranger suit and she takes his hand and puts it on her breast and Peter can feel her nipple pebbling outwards beneath her thin tank top, and then she’s shrugging out of the suit and then she stands up and lets it fall to the floor and she’s standing there looking at him, a little half-smile rising on her lips, and she reaches down for him and he gets up and presses her against the door behind them, very gently so he doesn’t hurt her by jamming the door’s wheel against her back, and she puts her legs around him so that he carrying her and then as she is reaching down awkwardly to fumble with his belt he kisses his way down her neck and she moans and inclines her head back so he can do so more easily and then he is slipping her tank top and her sports bra aside and she moans louder and his belt comes unbuckled with a loud click and Makado grinds herself against him and he can feel how wet she is through her panties and then she is pulling him greedily against her and he is kissing her so hard that their teeth clang together and Makado laughs into his mouth and it is the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard and felt and seen and and and and

* * *

“Are you still going to try and kill that copepod?”

“I think I won’t be able to walk all the way down there,” Makado murmurs, cuddling a little closer to Peter on the makeshift blanket they’ve made of their uniforms. He kisses the top of her head and he feels her lips press together against his shoulder.

“We should probably head back out.”

“Ugh,” she groans. “I really, _really_ do not feel up to the damn walk out through that bronchial passage right now.”

“Do I need to carry you?” he teases. Makado ruffles his hair.

“If I said yes, I really think you would,” she says. “Come on, up and at ‘em, Atom Ant.”

“What?”

“God, everybody is making me feel old today. Come on, let’s go.”

Makado rises and stretches, but Peter just watches her, smiling faintly, until Makado rolls her eyes at him and covers herself with her hands. “You’ve had enough fun for one night,” she tells him. “Let’s go.”

They manage to get dressed with a minimum of messing around, although Makado makes it rather difficult for him to put his pants on until Peter threatens to press her up against the wall again and she relents, her eyes flashing as brightly as her smile.

Makado gets half of her ranger suit on before the radio squawks, making them both jump. An unfamiliar voice comes on, so clear after the night’s worth of staticky transmissions that Peter’s ears keep imagining static where there is none. “Attention,” the voice says, “this is Incident Commander Kim, any rangers or rescue crew near the Pleasure Domes, please respond, over.”

Makado looks at Peter. Peter shakes his head. “Mak,” he says. “Stop it. We’ve done enough. Come on.”

Makado grins at him. “Where’s your sense of adventure?” she asks. Then she brings the radio up to her mouth and presses the talk button.


	9. Chapter 9

The line creaks again, menacingly, and Peter glares up at the broad webbed piton. “Goddam it,” he mutters.

“Did you say something?” Makado calls from below, and he glares down at her and kicks off, sliding down another seven or eight feet towards the gangway below. Makado, her ranger suit still half-unzipped, her hair still messy, grins at him, and he shakes his head but is unable to prevent himself from smiling back at her.

“This was a bad idea,” he grumbles again.

“You’re fine, you’re halfway there.”

“I don’t think it’s holding.”

“Don’t be such a baby, it’s fine. I made it and it didn’t even budge.”

“You also weigh like ninety pounds, so…”

“Excuse me,” she says, crossing her arms. “I’ll have you know I weigh a hundred and twenty.”

“Oh, okay, so I only have eighty pounds on you instead of a hundred and ten, I’m sure that makes a big difference to the piton.”

“I triple-checked it, you’re fine.”

Peter again glances downward into the Pit and sees nothing but a yawning darkness beneath him; he’s able to tear his eyes away after a moment but when he closes them he thinks he can see the darkness of the Pit’s gullet, not just the ordinary blackness of his closed eyelids.

He opens them and pushes off again, sliding down another six feet or so. Again he feels the line shifting and he makes sure he has a good grip on the folding climbing axe Makado had handed him.

Peter is ostensibly qualified to do this sort of thing, but the last time he’s had to rappel down a sheer cliff wall would probably have been seven or eight years ago and he’s understandably rusty. The recent spat of anti-rappelling regulations, both for guests and rangers, made it difficult to even get any sort of practice in, after that guest slipped and died trying to rappel down into a venterial sink to retrieve a dropped item. It had turned out he had been using a normal climbing piton and not one of the special (and expensive) expandable pitons necessary for climbing in the Pit, but even so Admin had been very clear that nobody ought to be rappelling if they could help it. Today, however, was clearly special circumstances.

“You’re not afraid of heights, are you?” Makado asks, and Peter groans.

“No, Makado, I’m not afraid of heights.”

“Are you sure?” Makado teases.

“I’m not afraid of heights, I’m afraid of falling.”

“Don’t fall, then.”

“Mak, you’re not helping.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice instantly softer. “Look, you’re almost there. Two more jumps.”

Peter pushes off and again he feels the rope jostle. “Mak, I’m gonna fall,” he says quickly. His mind is entirely blank; he can feel nothing but a sudden animal fear that feels as though it will claw its way up his throat and burst out of him.

“Peter, it’s okay. You’re close. One more jump.”

He is clinging to the rope so tightly that he can feel it burning against his palms, even through his suit gloves. He can’t make his legs move.

“Peter, you’re fine. You’re totally fine. I’m right here, I’ll grab you. One more jump.”

He pushes off again and feels a sudden wrench as the piton nearly comes free, and his heart pushes upwards into his throat. His face is a rictus grin as every one of his muscles tightens, a desperate instinctive attempt to scrabble to higher ground that simply isn’t anywhere to be found. He hangs there, suspended like a drop of rain, like a thrown rock at the apex of its arc, for what feels like much, much longer than the split second that it takes before gravity grabs him and shoves him back down again. He feels his heart rise up into his throat and he stares upwards at the piton, at the straining flesh, torn already at the sides, that it’s clinging to, and then Makado grabs him around the waist.

“Jesus Christ,” she mutters, pulling him backwards. He can feel the railing press against his back. “Alright, you’re gonna have to work with me here.”

“Mak, it’s going to –“

“Move your legs up, I can’t lift you.”

Peter manages to hike one of his legs over the railing before the piton breaks loose entirely, bringing with it a spray of venterial blood that falls like a fountain down into the Pit’s throat before the pressure squeezes the cut sealed again. Peter wobbles unsteadily there, perched on the railing, and feels himself tipping before Makado flings herself backwards, arms still around him, and pulls him over the side onto the gangway. She lies there for a moment, breathing heavily, then wriggles out from beneath Peter. “You okay?” she asks, and he nods after a moment. Her eyes flicker over his taut face down to his hands, still clenching the rope. She reaches down and gently disengages his fingers from it and after a moment he lets it drop, and Makado sits up and starts winding it up back into the carrying spool, hitting the release on Peter’s belt to let it fall from him.

“You sure you aren’t scared of heights?” she asks, glancing over at him, eyes heavy-lidded.

“Maybe a little.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I would have fallen all the way down there and fuckin’ splattered –“

“You didn’t though.”

“Yeah, but –“

“It’s okay,” she tells him again, and then she kisses him. He looks at her once their lips part and a small string of saliva extends between them and Makado laughs and breaks it with her finger. “Up until I was like 20 I was deathly afraid of the dark.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she nods. “I slept with a nightlight or with the TV on or anything to make sure there was light. I thought – “

Peter leans over and puts his arm around her. She still smells like peaches. “Why do you smell like peaches?” he asks her, and Makado laughs until she has tears in her eyes.

“That’s what you ask me? Why I smell like peaches?”

“I love it, you smell wonderful.”

“It’s my shampoo. Smell my hair.”

He smells her hair, then holds her closer and breathes in even deeper while she laughs and struggles to get away. “You are such a fucking dork,” she laughs, and then Peter runs his fingers through her hair, traces his nails over her scalp, and she cranes her neck backward into his hand. “God,” she moans. “Stop it, we have to go to the Pleasure Domes.”

“We’ve got time.”

“We had time like ten minutes ago, now we have to go. We used up all of our time getting dressed.”

“And whose fault was that?”

“I don’t recall you complaining.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Do you want to hear the end of the damn story about me being afraid of the dark?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, taking his hand out of her hair. She groans.

“Wait, no, go back.”

“Tell the story.”

“Fine. Jerk.”

“Tell the damn story, Mak,” he laughs. “Commander Kim is going to hit us up on the radio and tell us to stop fucking around.”

“You know what I had to hear to make me realize that there was nothing to be afraid of in the dark?”

“What’s that?”

“My guidance counselor at school said to me that there was nothing there in the dark that wasn’t there in the light, and that made me feel better. So I started sleeping without as many lights, and then finally with no light at all.”

“There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the light,” Peter repeats. “I like that. That’s catchy.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“How’s that supposed to help me get over a fear of falling?”

Makado thinks about it for a moment then pushes Peter lightly, and grins when he pretends to fall over. “Ouch,” he says. “Oh god, my ankle. Call Commander Kim, we can’t go on, we have to get out of here. Give us some paid leave.”

“Get up,” she tells him, kicking him in the back, little tiny beats with the fronts of her steel-toes. “Get up Freddie.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Come on.”

“Who’s Freddie?”

“Freddie Mercury. It’s a reference. Let’s go.”

They go.

* * *

Incident Commander Kim had sounded audibly relieved when Makado had answered the radio call. He’d told them to go to a different channel and they’d waited there for a moment until he’d gotten on again and briefed them that someone had hit the general alarm on a call box in the Pleasure Domes, so it was probably guests, not a ranger; a ranger would have just used their own emergency beacon. Initial seismic readings had indicated that the Domes had weathered the contractions relatively unscathed; the bathhouse had withstood the crushing pressures easily enough and while a few of the smaller Domes had popped, they didn’t think there was anyone in them at the time.

While Kim had droned on Peter had continued trying to figure out where he’d heard Kim before; the name hadn’t sounded familiar but his voice grew more and more so the longer he’d talked. Plus he had a tiny, nearly indistinguishable sliver of an accent that added a hint of distinctiveness to his otherwise rigorous and clipped tones. He didn’t recognize the name so it had to be somebody from Admin, someone in management, who he naturally wouldn’t have had much to do with.

“We’re not receiving reports of anything larger than macrobacteria in the pools, so you shouldn’t have any trouble there,” he’d said to Makado. Their eyes met and she rolled hers at Peter, and he’d grinned. “Just get down there and see what the deal is with those people, and get them out if you can. We’re trying to have everybody out of the park by two tonight.”

“What happens at two?” Makado had asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “You have your orders, ranger.”

“Head Ranger,” Makado had grumbled, but the transmission was over.

* * *

“Hey,” he says to Makado, halfway down to the tunnel to the Pleasure Domes. “I figured out where I’d heard Kim’s voice before.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He’s in HR. I had to go to a mandatory seminar last year and he was the guy leading it.”

Makado stops and looks at Peter. “He’s in _HR_?”

“Unless he got promoted to something different.”

“And he’s the _Incident Commander_?”

“Sure sounded that way on the radio.”

“Jesus.”

“No wonder everything was so fucked out there. Everybody else important must have been off for the Fourth.”

“I don’t know if you saw,” Makado said softly, “but on my way up the cliff when I was heading back, I caught a glimpse of another amalgam. They were wheeling it out on a stretcher but it was so big that bits were hanging out of the sheet they’d put over it.”

“You mean…”

She nods.

“Dead?” Peter asks, and she shrugs.

“Either dead or close to it.”

A long time ago, long enough that Makado was still taking care of her sister and hadn’t even heard of Mystery Flesh Pit, and Peter was still a green ranger doing grunt work at the LVC, a couple of guests, twin sisters Beverly and Vivian Green, had stumbled across an amorphous pile of flesh and organs nearly ten feet in diameter, laying there on the floor of the Organ Trail, glistening wetly in the harsh overhead lights. They’d stopped as soon as they’d seen it and Vivian had pulled the slim brochure they’d taken from the LVC and looked through it, trying to identify the carcass they saw ahead of them. Beverly had taken a couple of steps toward it and then the two sisters had had an argument, Vivian telling Beverly that she’d better not move towards it, what if it’s dangerous, and Beverly saying that the thing, whatever it was, was clearly hurt and that they had to help it, and Vivian retorting that they weren’t equipped to help it, they didn’t know a damn thing about biology or medicine and that they’d better head back to that call box and dial it and tell a ranger there was something really strange and hurt down there, and the argument then devolved into a brief discussion as to whether or not people really ever used those callboxes and whether they were properly maintained and whether or not you could get a fine if you used one when it wasn’t strictly necessary, and so on and so forth.

Luckily for the lawyers retained by Anodyne, they happened to do most of their arguing directly beneath a trail camera that captured not only the content of their argument, but also what happened next, when the amalgam creature sitting slopped heavily at the bottom of the trail raised its bloody, dripping, _human_ head and began screaming and begging in a distorted, crazed voice, while raising itself on various limbs and shambling towards them.

Anatomical amalgamation is a strange process that can occur in certain areas of the Pit that are in close proximity to both digestive glands and ballast bulbs; a common fact most visitors are unaware of is that naturally occurring ballast bulbs are dotted throughout the Pit’s anatomy, instead of just being clustered around the location of the Pleasure Domes, so this particular combination of locations isn’t particularly rare. The healing properties of untreated and undiluted amniotic ballast can heal even rather severe injuries, but when combined with gastric acid can produce a strange sort of melting effect that can lead to different creatures with wildly different anatomies becoming _combined_ in strange and unpredictable ways, without actually dying, or at least not dying immediately. Depending on how compatible the two (or more – there really is no upper limit beyond circumstance and basic physics) different biologies are, amalgams can end up living anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks, although generally most fall into the one to two-day range, and most deaths are generally believed to be due to starvation.

The particular amalgam that the Green sisters ran into was a combination of several pronghorn deer, one or two peccary (or javelina), a small female black bear, and a 38-year-old man who was later identified through dental records to be Gregory H. Peck, an avid hiker who, relatives claimed, ought to have been at his residence in Houston at the time. Later investigation turned up enough bills and mail accumulated at his house to indicate that he had been missing for over a week prior to his discovery at Mystery Flesh Pit.

During the court proceedings, the video from the trail camera was played, which showed Vivian fainting almost as soon as the amalgam became active, as well as Beverly attempting to move her sister but being unable to do so before the amalgam drew close to them and Beverly abandoned her sister and ran to the call box approximately half a mile up the trail. Of the remaining twenty-one minutes of trail camera footage, which showed the amalgam restraining and partially consuming Vivian while she attempted to escape before then withdrawing deeper into the Pit with Vivian’s half-eaten remains, only two minutes were played. Anodyne’s lawyers were able to show that the sisters had disregarded wildlife safety instructions they had been given during the mandatory five-minute video and, thanks to the waiver the sisters had signed before venturing alone into the Pit, were able to get the suit dismissed entirely.

The issue of the amalgam, however, was not so easily resolved. Given the nickname ‘Andre’ by the ranger team assigned to track it down and subdue it, mostly due to its large size and surprising durability, it proved notably evasive and cunning, several times organizing distractions or ambushes to attempt to draw the ranger team off its trail or to separate them so that it could pick them off. Unaccompanied travel on the Organ Trail was suspended entirely for nearly two weeks, an unheard-of event in park history, while the ranger team tracked the creature, and eventually they were able to surprise it and subdue it; however, during transport back to the Lower Visitor Center the amalgam was able to escape from its restraints and it had to be put down; the sordid affair was over and the entire Pit, it seemed, breathed a sigh of relief.

Since then, nobody had seen an amalgam with human components. ‘Andre’ was still whispered about by some of the old guard who’d actually been around while it was active, but over the years it had evolved into less of a historical footnote and more of a myth, a boogieman used to spook credulous guests and trainee rangers. Andre is still out there, went the story, he was never actually caught or killed, he escaped into the depths of the Pit and is still eating and growing. Sometimes at night you can hear his moans and screams, echoing from far away…

Of course, none of that is true. ‘Andre’s’ carcass was brought back to the LVC, then up to the surface in an opaque containment box, and is reportedly still kept there in one of the laboratories for study. Still, in an environment like the Pit, the various strange and inexplicable noises, smells, and reactions of the living environment can give such ghost stories more credence than they deserve.

All this and more flashed through Peter’s head when Makado suggested that she’d seen an amalgam with human features. He shakes his head at her. “This is fucked,” he says. “This whole thing. This park is going to fucking shut down after this shit.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Did you see those ejecta stains? Kim put everything way too close to the edge. I wouldn’t be surprised if people died cause of that, cause they got vomited on.”

“I saw Bruce with an acid burn,” he says, and Makado starts.

“Was he okay? Could you tell?”

“It was bad but he was alive, they were wheeling him into a hospital.”

“Okay,” she says. “He’s probably okay then.”

“Christ. Let’s get to the Domes and get out of here before any more shit happens tonight.”

They make their way along the gangway in silence, and then pass into the fleshy walls of the Pit. The corridor widens, enough to fit three abreast or for one of the utility carts to ride down if need be, and Peter and Makado spread out, Makado in front, Peter several feet behind. She looks back and grins at him halfway down but they stay silent, letting the groans and creaks and flexes of the Pit fill their ears.

The convulsions are continuing below their feet but they can identify them now as the familiar quake of peristalsis, the gullet continuing to crush and grind and contract against the slipping LVC.

Once they’d forced open the door to the walkway that once lead down from Bronchial to the LVC they had stood there, staring down at the mangled metal, down through the crazily canted grating, down at the gigantic lozenge shape of the LVC, slipped sideways and far, far downwards in the gullet than it ought to be. The lights inside were dark and above they could see a thick reinforced bundle of wires and cables, thick as a tree trunk, dangling against the Pit’s throat and leaving a blackened, charred scorch mark where it brushed against the flesh. “Jesus,” Makado had breathed, and Peter had agreed with her; it felt like a violation, like an attack; the LVC’s stabilizing arms, mighty hydraulic plates and pistons and buffers, had laid limply, half crushed, like unconscious limbs. As they watched the flesh of the gullet had convulsed again and the LVC had slipped further down, only by a couple of feet, but it was still slipping, was still being consumed.

The walkway to the Domes judders beneath their feet and Peter reaches out for balance, grips onto the railing; Makado puts her arms out to steady herself but rides out the shudder. That wasn’t peristalsis, that was some other twitch or tic, some bundle of muscles perhaps miles long convulsing deep below them, the effects ricocheting upwards like falling dominos until it reached them. It stops or at least quiets after a minute or so, and they share a guarded look, both of them wondering the same thing – how much worse is this going to get? Is the Pit going to fall back asleep or wake up? What the hell would it even mean if it did wake up?

As they approach the bathhouse, a smaller rounded structure designed as a staging area for visitors entering the baths, with lockers, showers, and so on, they can hear the familiar wet slopping sound of the rhythmic waves of ballast lapping against a pool. They look at each other again and Peter grins.

“Wish I could take you to the Domes under better circumstances.”

Makado barks out a short laugh then remembers herself and covers her mouth. “You already had me once tonight,” she reminds him, “don’t get greedy.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I need you on point, cut the blood flow down there,” she says, glancing meaningfully at his groin, and now Peter is the one stifling a laugh. He takes out his pistol and checks it, again not needing to but the routine action makes him feel a little better. Makado observes, one sardonic eyebrow raised.

“Nothing other than macros down here, remember?” she says.

“Yeah, well, I trust Kim about as far as I can throw him, so…”

“Me too,” Makado agrees. She checks her own pistol and for a moment there’s nothing but metallic clicks. Makado looks up. “How many extra magazines do you have?”

“Three, you?”

“Two, I don’t have enough room on my damn belt because I’m so skinny. Can you give me one?”

“Then I’ll have two.”

“You’re bigger than I am, you only need two.”

“What am I supposed to do, just punch the copepods?”

Makado laughs again, quieter this time. “If there’s a copepod in there we’ve got bigger problems. Come on, give me a mag.”

“I’ll trade you a mag for a stunner battery.”

“You’re really going to _trade_ , not just give it to me?”

“Unless there’s something else you’d like to trade,” he says, waggling his eyebrows at her, and she rolls her eyes, a grin spreading across her face. She stretches up and punches him in the shoulder.

“You’re ridiculous. Let’s go.”

“Hang on,” Peter says. “Call Kim and ask him for a position update.”

“Can’t we just go and stick our heads in and then walk back?”

“You’re the one who wanted to get involved in this in the first place, let’s not half-ass it now.”

“Yeah,” Makado agrees. “Kim seems to be doing enough half-assing for everyone.”

They call Kim, there on the edge of the bathhouse, the sound of ballast still lapping in the background. He picks up eventually, sounding harried; it takes ten minutes for him to get a status on the signal they’re supposed to be tracking, but he gets it to them eventually, and then they sign off and enter the bathhouse. It’s in disarray but not so much so that something might be in there, lurking and waiting for them; it seems, to Makado at least, like just the ordinary sort of panicked mess that would result if the convulsion alarms went off while people were still inside, some half-naked, some still showering, and so on. The lights are off but the emergency lighting seems brighter here, due to it being tighter quarters. They walk slowly through the bathhouse, clearing corners as they go, checking the showers – someone left one of the showers on and the water is seeping out into the tiled floor of the lobby – but they’re empty.

They group, finally, at the entrance to the stairs down to the lower baths, the Domes below level four that Makado was never able to get promoted to. She looks at Peter and he looks at her; the elevator is clearly out of commission, they can peer clear down the shaft and see the breaks in the line from where it was squeezed too tightly by the flesh surrounding it. They’re thinking the same thing – if someone is injured they won’t be able to carry them up the twelve or thirteen flights of stairs to get them to safety, not to mention the actual journey up and out of the Pit. Kim had told them that an emergency venterial crew was going to be widening a route into the Pit but had been unable to give them more than a general timeframe on when it would be ready for use. Peter and Makado had planned to make their way out through Bronchial again if they’d had to, but after the incident with the rope and piton, they’d probably have to take an even longer, more circuitous route to get there, one that probably would be difficult, if not impossible with who knows how many injured people in tow; they had medkits and hypos that could help but neither of them were trained to deal with real serious injuries.

Makado glances at Peter again and bites her lip; he looks resolved, his jaw set in a hard line, but she can see how tired he is just from the subtle slump to his shoulders, the cast to his eyes.

The way Kim had phrased it, he’d made it sound like it was just a quick check; then after Makado had said they were in the area and could make it down there quickly, he’d told her that seismo had confirmed at least four or five people stuck in a Dome; he couldn’t say why, or if they were hurt, but surely they were – if they weren’t, they would have been able to make their way up to the bathhouse at least…right?

“Hey,” Peter says, nudging her out of her reverie. “You good?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m sorry I –“

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says. “We can help. You made the right call.”

“But –“

“No buts. Let’s get this done.”

And with that, Peter grins at her, his teeth glinting a dull red in the e-lighting, and they vanish down the darkly litten stairs, deeper down the rabbit hole.

* * *

“Oh, Jesus,” Makado says, stopping at a landing, one hand clapping loudly to her forehead. Peter turns, peers at her uncertainly.

“What is it?” he asks, and Makado shakes her head.

“I have a killer headache all of a sudden.”

“Mak,” he says, pointing. “Your nose.”

Her eyes ice with confusion as she raises her hand to her nose. She draws it back and her mouth drops open slightly when she sees the blood on her palm. “Shit,” she says. “What the fuck is –“

“Fuck!” Peter groans, and Makado jumps.

“What is –“

“I’ve got a headache too now.”

They stare at each other for a moment. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says. He takes a knee, his eyes swimming. It feels as though his head is splitting in two, and his eyes are watering so badly that he can barely see the medkit he’s rooting through. He hears a loud crack and looks up to see Makado holding a test canister in her hand, cracked in half to activate. Her eyes are fixed on the little glass readout; he can see her lips moving as she counts quietly to thirty. He tosses her a gauze pack and she holds it to her nose, not taking her eyes off of the canister. She shakes her head finally.

“Nothing chemical, the air’s breathable.”

“Then what the fuck is –“

Something clicks inside of Peter’s head and he stops talking. Makado looks at him. His eyes are bleary and unfocused; he can see two of her and it’s only with difficulty that he can make the images resolve themselves. She’s looking at him, eyes wide with concern, the gauze pack already turning pink with the absorbed blood. “What is it?” she asks. “What’s wrong?”

Peter isn’t able to put his finger on it. “I don’t know,” he says. “Something’s wrong, something isn’t right.”

Makado laughs, loudly. Her lips are drawn back in a fake smile but her eyes are just as bright and alert and worried as they were a moment before. She freezes. “I didn’t do that,” she blurts. “I didn’t laugh, I didn’t –“

Peter realizes what feels wrong. He hasn’t had a conscious thought for two minutes now. He tries to think of something but finds that he can’t. His mind is utterly blank. He opens his mouth to tell Makado this but he can’t. She reaches out and clings on to him. Her legs aren’t working properly; one of her knees keeps bending and she isn’t moving it. Something else is, someone else in her head is pulling the levers.

Gradually over the next five minutes the feeling passes from them. Makado’s limbs stop twitching to themselves and the rictus grin that had drawn back her lips departs from her, and slowly, as though from a great distance, Peter can feel his headache fading and his thoughts returning. Makado raises her head from where she was cradling it in her hands; Peter can see the dried blood all down the front of her face cracking like desert soil as she licks her lips. She makes a face, experimentally, as though she isn’t sure her muscles will obey her.

“You good?”

She blows a breath out. “No,” she says. “I’m scared. What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you ever felt anything like that before while you were working here?”

“No, never.”

Peter rises to his feet finally. He holds a hand out, and Makado takes it. Her face is pale, or at least paler. “Let’s get this done,” he says again, trying to smile, but it’s forced and Makado can tell.

“What if that happens again?”

“More reason to get it done quickly.”

They make their way slowly, haltingly, down to the Salus bath. Middling potency, medium popularity. Its main benefit was that, aside from the main bath, Salus is the biggest. Plenty of ogling going on while the park was open and not in the process of tearing itself apart. At the same time, not potent enough to send anybody into any potentially dangerous paroxysms of lust, except for maybe the most excitable of psyches, but that’s the human element, isn’t it?

Makado can smell it before they get there, a thick stench of rot and decay, almost sweet. She looks at Peter and can tell from his face that he knows it’s going to be bad. Ballast doesn’t have much of a smell to it naturally; a faint, faint odor of vanilla, something of a filmy organic taste. Nothing like the thick smell wafting down the padded, gentle corridor at them like it’s a real thing, walking at them with balled fists, ready to do harm.

“Jesus,” Makado says again, and Peter, eyes watering, draws his pistol and holds it low by his hip. With one finger he works the slide backwards enough to see the gleam of the cartridge in the chamber and then, faintly reassured, holds his hand over his mouth and nods to Makado, and she reaches forward and pushes the door open and Peter enters the bath before he can reconsider.

The bath is large enough that the emergency lights leave a little to be desired, darkness crabbing itself into the corners as they push inwards, Makado’s hand resting on the butt of her pistol, her eyes wide, jumping like roulette wheels, checking angles.

Peter frowns. “Red eye,” he says.

“Whole rye,” Makado says automatically, drawing closer to him. He reaches out blindly for her, palm open.

“Give me your flashlight.”

She slips it to him without questioning. She can see what’s caught his attention; the Dome’s roof has ruptured and a steady stream of something is pouring from it, trickling downwards and splashing onto…something. A big, clustered, huddled something, hunkered there as though it were waiting for them, there on the far side of the pool. Peter clicks the flashlight on; the beam flashes upwards, illuminating the ceiling, and he shifts it to cover the bloody tear in the ceiling and they both can see the tell-tale off-yellow color of gastric acid pouring in. Makado feels her stomach clench reflexively.

“Shit,” she says.

Peter brings the flashlight down further, tracking the stream. “Stop,” she says. She can feel panic in the back of her throat. “Stop, Pete, let’s go, we need to fucking leave, this isn’t going to be good.”

He brings the beam down further and for a moment neither of them can comprehend what they’re gazing at. Its lines and form is so alien that their minds refuse to process it, but then the flashlight traces along a horribly _human_ face, mouth contorted in a silent scream, eyes open, reflecting the light, but unseeing, the face half-covered by a drooping belly, red and wealed with acid burns and the telltale white scarification produced by ballast healing. The bodies melt into each other and into less human ones, ones that must have fallen through from the gastric bulb above when the roof tore open. Peter can see furred hindquarters melting into feathered bodies, slender and red and dripping, struck through with human fingers, the fingernails elongated like taffy.

Makado turns away and then bends double and throws up. “Oh fuck,” she says before another retch misshapes the words. Peter winces. He is still playing the flashlight’s beam over the sheer expanse of the thing, trying to comprehend it. He shines the light square in the face of a young woman, her head lolled over to the side, her neck protruding from the groin of what must have at one point been an elderly man, wrinkled and leathery and drooping, and when the light hits her eyes she blinks. Peter almost drops the flashlight.

“Mak,” Peter says, his eyes glued to the dripping-red figure rising from the corpse pile. It rises and rises and rises, thickening, a forest of limbs sliding from the pile, human and animal and invertebrate and insect, he sees wings and fur and eyes, he sees inside-outs, beating hearts fixed as though stapled to the blinking head of a deer, a big whitetail, half of its rack buried in the fleshy side of the creature.

“Goddam it,” Makado says thickly. She’s still turned away, she hasn’t seen it. Her hands are quivering.

“Mak,” Peter repeats. An arm the size of a trash can plops wetly on the floor and its thousand fingers twitch, and he sees a bear wrapped in it, in the ribcage of a wolf and the ropy intestines of a fish, cast across it like a net. It spreads out like an elephant’s foot but it holds and it hoists the amalgam upwards until it towers above them, even from across the Dome, and it opens a thousand eyes and looks at them a thousand ways, dull glassy fish eyes and serrated insect eyes and rotating avian eyes and pronghorned bovine eyes, slit eyes, cat eyes, and round wild knowing human eyes, blue and green and brown.

“What?” Makado asks, looking up finally, and then she sees it and she stills, the moment stills, the air stills, even the ballast stills, slopping softly against the lips of the pool, but quieter, respectful of the tension of the air, cautious of it. The world holds its breath.

Peter feels Makado raising her hand to her face next to him and he feels his mind going glassy again, like everything has just shifted out of focus. He looks at her and sees that her nosebleed is back, the thick trail of it already making its way down the dimpled curve of her lip, looking like nothing more than paint in the flickering red e-lights. Her eyes are bright and she can see the fear in them. Then as one they turn and sprint towards the exit to the hallway while the thing behind them half falls half shuffles towards them, and it does not roar or scream or shriek but its thousand mouths open and in a thousand voices it asks them calmly, in hoarse whispering tones, in conversational voice, in a commanding tongue, all at once, a whining undertone of animal moans and cries and calls, sounding like Legion, to stop, to come back, to help it, that they can’t leave it here like this.


	10. Chapter 10

The door opens and the bell rings and Peter and I both look up; the lady I’d ran into earlier on my first day in Gumption walks in and nods to Peter. Through the course of the story we’d finished breakfast and then I’d walked with Peter down to the 7-11 and he’d clocked in and started his shift while I sat on a stack of beer cases and listened, turning the voice recorder to its highest sensitivity to capture everything he was saying. I could always go back and take a transcript later if I had to, if the audio was too loud or too distorted.

Her eyes stray over me but whatever she thinks she doesn’t betray anything with her expression. I’ve reached out automatically and covered the voice recorder with my hand as soon as I heard the door open; it was an automatic action, quick as a whip, no conscious thought required, and I slide my thumb down its ridged side, click it off.

“Hey, Michelle,” Peter says.

“Hey, Peter,” she says.

He glances at his watch and whistles. “I didn’t realize it was four already.”

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” she says, a slight layer of sarcasm flavoring her words. I can feel myself bristling but I ease myself down. Peter’s eyes flick over to me.

“Well,” he says, and I feel my mouth drop open.

“No way. You can’t be serious.”

“What?”

“You aren’t going to finish the story?”

Peter grins at me. “I have to go get ready,” he says in a soft voice. “I’ll finish telling you later.”

“Oh my god.”

“What?” he repeats.

“What the hell happens to Makado?”

“She…” he starts, and then stops. I can see a flicker of pain cross his face like the dappled back of a fish beneath a sunstruck river. My heart falls within my chest and I realize that I’m becoming far too invested to be objective, I need to take a step back. “She made it out fine,” he tells me. I don’t believe him.

Despite all of my efforts to cajole him he won’t tell me any more. He assures me that we’ll have enough time tonight, that it’s going to be a lot of sitting around and waiting while I film far-off dots moving around under the cover of darkness and that he’ll tell me then. It smells like a cop-out to me, like he just doesn’t want to get into what happened to Makado.

It’s unbelievable enough already, though, isn’t it? Amalgams and copepods and all of that stuff. I hear it and I think, oh, this is the plot to a movie. This isn’t real, it can’t be. Even though I’m only a few miles from it, even though I’m going to be _going_ there tonight, it doesn’t feel like the Pit is a place that actually exists. It feels like somebody is pulling my leg.

Or it would, if it weren’t for the look on Peter’s face when he talks about Makado. That at least is real. Whether everything else around it is fake, I guess there’s a little kernel of doubt still sprouting in my head somewhere, the tiny eternal skeptic inside of me that isn’t willing to believe anything it can’t touch or feel or see itself.

We walk out of the 7-11 together and look at each other. Peter nods. “Same place as where you followed before. You know how to get there?”

I nod as well. “Line up the two rocks and the cactus with the setting sun and walk straight until I hit the three boulders in the dip of the hill.”

“Good memory. If you mess up you’ll be able to see us probably anyway, I’ll have my flashlight.”

“How many people are coming?”

“Besides you there’s three others, one guy from the cult for his initiation and two others who…well, you know.”

“Yeah. Was that what Erica was talking to you about the other day?”

“When she pulled up at midnight or whenever? Yeah, she was just telling me who to look out for. Because those guys want to be able to get back out again I have to give them different instructions, that kind of thing.”

I shudder in spite of myself. “Well, see you tonight.”

“See you,” he says. He turns and walks quickly away and then past the corner of the building and I am alone. I stand there for a moment and then lean up against the side of the building. The sun is hot but not terribly so and here in the shade it’s really quite a nice afternoon.

A car pulls up and turns into one of the pumps. It’s the second customer I’ve seen all day. The guy looks over at me but it isn’t anyone I know or have seen before, and after a moment he puts his card in and fills up the tank, then drives off.

I look round and, after a moment, let myself slide down the faux-brick façade of the 7-11 and stretch my legs out in front of me. My knee cracks like a gunshot as I do and I wince. I take my phone out of my pocket and dial a number and listen as the harsh buzzing tone drills one, two, three, four, five times into my ear, and then there’s a click and the answering machine picks up.

“Hi, you’ve reached Mark Dzilenski. I’m not able to take your call right now but if you leave me your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks, bye.”

“Hi, dad,” I say, and I feel a wave of emotion pressing at me that I refuse to confront. I swallow. “I’m sorry our call got disconnected the other night, I think there’s something wrong with my phone. It was good hearing your voice, I’m glad you and mom are doing okay.”

I lick my lips. Alright, Roan, you’ve been very glib so far. Spit it out.

“I, uh,” I start. Come on. “I got some news the other day that I wanted to tell you, I…”

“If you are satisfied with your call, you can hang up, or press 1 for delivery options. To re-record –“

I hang up the call, and then I stand up. I rummage in my bag for a cigarette and light it, and then walk slowly back to the hotel, taking my time. I’m meeting Peter at one in the morning but my nerves are already balling around themselves in a panic. I feel like I’m going to be sick.

“So what?” I ask out loud. I look over and see my distorted reflection looking back at me in the thick glass window of a closed barbershop. I look tired. “So what?” I mutter again. I look at the me in the window a little longer but I don’t like the way she looks at me so I toss my cigarette on the ground and crush it out and hurry a little more. It feels like there is a cloud looming behind me but it’s just in the sky, promising rain.

When I get back to the hotel room I unfold my laptop, dump the audio files from the voice recorder back onto it, and then I connect to the extremely rickety wi-fi network the motel offers and I look up what exactly the penalty is for trespassing on federal property. It’s not that bad, actually; a misdemeanor in all cases, at least under federal law. I don’t know if the site around the Pit is solely administered federally or if state law would also apply, though. Or would it count as trespassing on a military base? Apparently that can be a felony, if it’s important enough or if you’re being malicious about it. I do more googling around but the information I turn up is cryptic and limited. I wonder, not for the first time, if I’m putting myself on some kind of list doing this sort of research, then shake my head. Whatever.

The evening passes slowly and my nervousness doesn’t fade no matter how many cigarettes I smoke, leaned over on the wiry metal bannister, staring off into the flat, unexciting horizon. I watch television just to pass time, let Baggage and The Price is Right and Family Feud wash over me like an ocean, like waves, like I’m drowning. Am I drowning? If I were sane I think I’d feel like I were drowning.

When the time comes I put some pants on, long ones this time, shrug into my jacket, make sure I have my voice recorder and my camcorder and my slim little folding knife, more of a letter opener than anything else. I laugh at myself when I tuck it into my pocket but I still do it.

“Alright Roan,” I say to myself, staring in the mirror, sounding braver than I really feel, tucking my hair back in a ponytail. “Let’s go commit a felony.”

* * *

Peter raises his hand in greeting as I crest the hill and I wave back at him, click the light on my phone off and move down, join the little circle. He’d said there would be three others; two are here so far. One is a small Asian girl, so skinny it looks like she’d burst into flame if she crossed her legs too fast, and the other is a tall, heavy guy, looking like he’s in his late forties, balding hard. He has bags under his eyes and he keeps reflexively running his hands together. “Hi Lily,” Peter says to me and I blink and almost look behind myself to see if there’s someone back there, but he winks at me and I realize I’m supposed to be Lily. I wonder if there’s anything else important he’s left out.

“Hey,” I say. The Asian girl glances at me and then looks away again. Her eyes are very dark and it looks as though she’s chewing lightly on the inside of her cheek, sucking it inwards and holding it between her teeth and then letting it go again.

“This is Bao and Rey,” he tells me, indicating each of them. I nod at them.

“Hey,” I say again. “You guys, uh…excited?”

Peter shakes his head minutely and I feel faintly embarrassed, like I’ve said something I clearly shouldn’t have without realizing the taboo.

To their credit, they definitely do not look excited; nervous is more accurate. Perhaps haunted would be appropriate as well. Rey keeps glancing out into the darkness as though he can see something moving around out there; I can see his eyes focus on something and track it for a while before slipping off like a thrown egg slipping slowly down a window. I look out into the darkness as well but even though my eyes aren’t as adapted now thanks to Peter’s big utility flashlight throwing enough light to make me squint, it is very clear that there is nothing out there, nothing large enough that he’d be able to see it and track it like that.

I want to talk to him, I want to take out my recorder, I want to pry my way into his head, but I restrain myself. This is clearly not the time. The camcorder is still in my jacket pocket, the bulky night-vision attachment screwed onto its snouty muzzle already, fully charged and ready to go, but clearly I am supposed to be pretending to be one of these people. While we lapse into another uneasy silence and Peter checks his watch, I consider my new existence as Lily.

These two people are clearly so far gone that they barely recognize me as a person, let alone the deeper distinction between Roan and Lily. The way Rey keeps seeing ghosts and watching them like he’s ready to bolt or to fight, the way Bao keeps jumping at sounds none of the rest of us can hear, clearly they’re the two who are – what even is the right word? Afflicted? Who are, at least in Peter’s estimation, beyond retrieval?

I look at Bao. She’s young, maybe about my age, maybe a little younger. Twenty-two or twenty-three? Very possibly. Bao…the name sounds more Chinese than Japanese or Korean but I don’t know enough about Eastern culture to positively identify her, plus obviously there are more Asian countries than just China, Japan, and Korea. And if I’m supposed to be one of these people then should I care? Should I be getting into character?

I look again at Peter and feel a faint spark of anger at the fact that he didn’t let me know, didn’t warn me, but then I realize he didn’t really have a way to – he doesn’t have my number, and maybe this was something that resolved itself later in the afternoon after we’d parted.

I’ll draw the line at aping those nervous tics. Just watching these two is making me sad, giving me a feeling like someone’s taking hold of my heart and squeezing. It feels cruel, knowing I can do nothing.

Clearly the reason I’m Lily is because the third person, the guy from the cult, will know I’m coming, or at least will recognize my name. I think back and wonder if anybody had had a chance to take a photo of me while I was out walking around the town, but I’d have given people so many opportunities to take one without me noticing that it’d be pointless.

Surely if there was some sort of danger, if the cult _knew_ for sure I would be here and they were perhaps willing to prevent me from coming somehow, Peter would have contacted me. He knows the motel I’m at, he might not know the room but if Erica Walken could get the phone number to it, surely Peter could have as well…right?

I toss my head, work my jaw sideways. It feels like it wants to crack but it doesn’t; I can feel the tension in the bulgy little knot of muscles down the side of my cheek. It doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I’m going in with them, cult or no cult.

There’s a crunching of feet on the dry hard earth behind us and Rey and I both turn to watch the third guy, tall and dark, making his way down the hill to us. He’s young, with a trimmed beard, and close-cropped hair. His eyes are very small; they linger on me for a moment and then flick to Rey and Bao.

“Alright,” Peter says, “everybody’s here. We’re going to be going under the fence through a hidden tunnel. It’s going to be tight so you guys are going to have to drop to your stomachs and crawl. It was going to be a waste-drainage pipe but they didn’t give the contractors they hired to do it the right plans and so it turned out that they were digging right on top of one of the power lines for the electric fence. They just left the pipe in there and put a fake rock over the entrance.”

I almost laugh when I hear that. It’s too easy. There must be a catch, mustn’t there?

“The pipe is going to let you out on the side of the patrol road inside the fence,” Peter says, looking between us. He weights his words carefully. “There should not be a patrol moving at the time that we go through,” he says, “but on the off chance that there is, whoever is in front needs to just freeze and wait, you understand?”

He looks around at us until we each nod. It takes Bao the longest but she does acknowledge, at least, that he’s speaking. “You,” he says, pointing to the guy from the cult, “your name is Marcus, right?”

“That’s right,” he says. He has a slow, deep, purposeful voice.

“You’re going to be in front. I don’t normally come in but I will be this time, I have some business to take care of inside. Me and Lily here,” he says, pointing to me, “will be in the rear. You two will be in the middle,” and Rey and Bao nod, a little quicker this time.

“Once we’re inside, you’re going to be going in through a disused emergency exit that they haven’t sealed up because the Pit uses it to breathe. I’m not going to lie to you, it won’t be pleasant. It’s going to be tight, hot, smell horrendous, and it’ll be pitch-black, but it’s a one-way trip without any side branches, so just push through it and you will get through and out into the old Bronchial section. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there but all of my information says that any damage is fairly minimal and you should still be able to get through. Once you’re in, you’re on your own. If you want to come back out, take the same drainage pipe that we go in through and be careful not to cross the road right in front of a patrol. This area that we’re in, there aren’t any cameras, there’s no other detection, so as long as you look out for patrols, you’re fine. If you get caught, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. If you don’t tell them anything, the worst they can do is felony trespassing and a $500 fine. It isn’t great but it also isn’t the worst thing in the world. Understood so far?”

We all nod. My heart is beating quickly; I can hear it in my ears, a little thump reminding me that I’m really doing this, I’m really going to do it.

“Great,” Peter says. “Once you’re inside, the deeper you go the less likely it is that someone will catch you. Flip side is, the deeper you go, the more likely it is some _thing_ will catch you. Anything with a sign that says ‘LVC’ or ‘Main Gullet,’ don’t go that way, you will get caught. I don’t know what you want to do down there or how long you want to do it for, doesn’t matter to me, but try not to get caught. And one more thing,” he says, looking very seriously at all of us. “Do not, under any circumstances, try to go in or out any other way than the one we’re going to take. That means _do not go down to the main orifice_. That is the most watched area in the entire facility and it is completely open. I know that this way isn’t great but it’s safe, easy, and it is unobserved. Everybody good?”

Once again we all nod, but I wonder whether or not Rey and Bao have really absorbed the information. Rey keeps watching things moving around in the shadows and Bao’s eyes are unfocused and glassy, and her head rocks lightly to the beat of something none of the rest of us can hear.

Peter gives instructions on how to get to the entrance, which I can now identify as being the same way as he and Makado got out during the disaster, the same breathing orifice that they’d pushed their way through four years ago.

Something about the…the enormity of it, of the thing beneath us and ahead of us and surrounding us, is getting to me. I can feel my skin prickling and a flash of heat passes over me suddenly and I nearly gasp but I contain myself. It wouldn’t do to have a panic attack right now, I tell myself, and I slowly, gradually, get myself back under control. I can feel my hands shaking at my sides and I shove them deep into my pockets. I want a cigarette.

There is finally, it seems, nothing left to talk about, no more instructions or warnings Peter can give us. He nods to himself, going over some kind of mental checklist, and then shrugs. “Alright,” he says. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later I’m already laughing at myself for getting so worked up over something so banal. Yeah, the other day when I followed Peter it had seemed like very serious business but here, actually making the trip myself, I can’t help but feel like it’s very small potatoes. It’s just a fence, I say to myself as we walk up to it, and then that turns into it’s just a waste drainage pipe that I have to shimmy through on my belly, grimacing as dust and grime gets on my nice coat, but it can’t be helped. Peter’s behind me and Bao is ahead of me; Peter is staring at my ass, I’m sure, but then I realize that it’s pitch black in here so maybe I can give my ego a break and not assume it’s all about me. I keep having to prop myself up on my hands and knees to readjust the camcorder and make sure I’m not smashing it to bits on the hard floor of the pipe, but eventually we make it through and then we’re standing on an identical bit of hard, scrubby earth as we were, just now we’re on the other side of the fence. As I watch, Bao, Rey, and Marcus all take off along the path, crossing it quickly and dropping down into the ditch below, and then they are just dark silhouettes making their way beneath the sharp half-moon. I get out my camcorder and flip it on and start filming them; the night-vision is really not that effective but it’s way better than just filming in the dark.

Peter clambers to his feet next to me and dusts himself off. “Well,” he says after a moment, “there they go.”

“They really don’t get caught?”

“Not usually. The ones who’re there to, you know, die to it, they go as deep as they can as quick as they can, far as I understand it, and the people with the cult tend to stay in the upper areas. There’s not very many personnel in the Pit right now so the odds of running into somebody is slim.”

I point ahead of us. “Can we go sit on that ridge? I want to get some shots of the Pit itself.”

“Sure. If a patrol comes we’ll have to duck down but it should be alright.”

We make our way across the road and down onto the ridge. I find a little flat section for us to sit on and then I pick out the three dark blobs making their way carefully up the hill. I whistle softly. “That’s the easiest way up there?”

“It is,” he says. “It doesn’t look like it but there’s a clear path, you just have to be careful of your footing.”

The figure in front stops for a moment. I can’t tell from this distance but I think it might be Bao. She stops and turns and looks across the great downward sloping crater of the Pit, and I pan the camcorder around and take a shot of it as well. I frown at the image. “That isn’t flesh down there, is it?”

“No,” Peter says. “They filled it all in with concrete. Do you see that little dark spot over there?”

I look where he’s pointing. “Yes.”

“That’s the orifice. They don’t keep it dilated as wide as they did during the park days, and the elevator is way smaller, too. There’s a little command center down in the gullet but it’s like, maybe a quarter of the size of the LVC. They’re all about minimizing impact now.”

Bao seems to be rocking unsteadily back and forth there on the trail and I turn the camera to record her. “So what happened to Makado?” I ask.

“I told you, she got out fine.”

“You know I don’t believe that.”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe it, it’s the truth.”

“Alright, can you introduce me to her, then? I’d like to meet her, or at least have a phone call.”

Peter laughs. “I really don’t think you’d want that.”

“Why not?”

He makes a little grunting noise. “I think you’d find that she –“

“Holy shit!” I blurt. Peter jumps next to me, looks around wildly.

“What is it?”

I’ve already gotten to my feet. “Bao just fucking ran back down the trail and someone else lost their balance and fell off,” I tell him, pointing at the dark object bouncing down the cliff face towards the white concrete below. Whoever it is they’re flopping like a rag doll, and I wince with each impact. “Jesus Christ,” I say, pointlessly. Next to me, Peter curses.

“Stay here,” he tells me before hustling off into the darkness. It looks as though he’s heading for Bao; I can barely see her but it looks as though she’s collapsed against a large boulder maybe a hundred yards away at the base of the hill, her shoulders shaking.

Well, Bao’s fine. I guess. She must have lost her nerve. I turn around, peer through the screen of the camcorder. Whoever she pushed, either Marcus or Rey, he’s reached the bottom by now and slumped into a huddled pile at the bottom of the crater. I can see one limb extended out limply like an exclamation point. I look back at Bao; Peter’s reached her and is hunched down next to her, trying to get her to move. She’s hugging her legs to her chest and I can see her shaking her head frantically. Did she do it on purpose? I didn’t see the whole thing but it looked like she just panicked.

When I turn back to Rey I can see him moving, trying to get up. “Oh fuck,” I say. He pushes himself up on his hands and then his arm gives out and he falls and lays there. I can just barely see, through the camcorder, his chest rising and falling. “Goddam it,” I say to myself, and then I fold up the camcorder and stuff it back into my jacket pocket, and then I get up and start to carefully pick my way down the heavy rocky incline of the crater lip.

* * *

I’m scared. I’m not ashamed to admit it, I’m terrified. I’m scared that someone is going to see me, is going to see whoever it is at the bottom, Rey or Marcus, and roll up with the black helicopters and take you wherever the Men in Black take you. It’s an insane, worthless fear but I still feel it. About half of me wants to bolt and run, scurry my way back into that drainage pipe and out and never look back, but I look at the lump ahead of me, hardly even seeming to be a person, no matter how beat up, and I see him again trying to rise and again falling and then I’m down there with him, my ankle aching from where I stepped wrong and very slightly rolled it, and I get down on my knees next to him. “Hey,” I say, “I’m here, it’s okay.”

He’s muttering in anguished Spanish to himself and I have to repeat myself a few times before he cracks his eyes open, his face dirty, blood from a cut above his eyebrow seeping down and stinging at his eye. He says something to me in Spanish and I trot out the little I know. “Lo siento,” I say, “Uh. Habla ingles?”

“Yeah,” he coughs. “You’re – Lily?”

“My name is Roan actually. Are you okay? Can you stand?”

“Rowan?”

“Roan. Like the horse. My parents were hippies.”

He looks at me like I’m speaking Greek and I might as well be. I put my hand out. “Can you stand?” I ask again, and he takes it and I help him pull himself up but his leg buckles beneath him and he lets out a cry of pain that echoes in the deserted Pit, bouncing off the soft white concrete expanse.

“I think I broke it,” he says. “Oh god.”

He’s staring around again, wilder than before. I look around in spite of myself but as I knew there would be there’s nothing there. I reach into my pocket and click the voice recorder on.

“What do you see?” I ask him.

“You don’t see them?”

“No, I can’t,” I shake my head. “What are they?”

That gets his attention and he tears his eyes from whatever vision he can see cavorting around us. He looks at me closely. “You don’t…you don’t see them?”

“No.”

“Oh,” he says, sounding disappointed. He tries to rise again but I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Wait,” I tell him. “Your leg must be broken, we can’t –“

“I’m so close,” he says. His eyes are wild now, and fixed on me. Before I can take a step back he’s thrown his weight towards me awkwardly and grabbed my arm. His hands are sweaty. “You have to help me.”

“Put your arm around me,” I tell him, crouching down. He’s heavy enough that I don’t know whether I’ll really be able to help much, but if I get on the same side as his hurt leg I can at least make sure he doesn’t have to put weight on it. The hard part will be getting up again –

Rey cries out again and I wince. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “This is going to be rough but we have to get you up.”

“No,” he says, leaning on me. His face is pale now, his mouth tight and drawn with the effort.

“No?” I ask. “Come on, we need to leave like _right now_ –“

“No,” he repeats, one shaking finger extended out ahead of us. He’s pointing to the tall gantry of the elevator down into the Pit. “We have to go there,” he says. “I have to –“

“Absolutely not,” I tell him. “We have to _go_ –“

But he is starting forward towards the gantry and I curse and walk with him, because if I don’t he’ll fall, he’ll cry out again, he’ll fucking crawl on his hands and knees over to the goddam gantry, I can see it in his eyes, I _know_ he will without even wondering how I know, and even though the lurching pace we set is clearly causing him pain, he urges me forward without any regard for his leg, hanging uselessly at his side, the foot jostling along the concrete every now and then and making him groan, a low deep animal noise that makes me feel as though I’m going to be sick.

We make it about halfway before a deep, rumbling alarm starts somewhere and ratchets up to a screech and all the lights click on and turn the night to day and I almost collapse. “Oh fuck,” I say.

“Come on,” he says. I glare at him; I’m sweating, the tight grip he has around my shoulders is starting to hurt, and he isn’t exactly slim. It’s taking all of my effort to keep him upright and walking and I am so close to just dropping him. I give him a dirty look and try to summon up my willpower, every single ounce of meanness and cruelty in my body and just twist out of his grasp and let him fall, but I can’t do it.

“Goddam it, Rey,” I tell him. “It’s a fucking elevator, they won’t let you on, there aren’t going to be stairs you can go down.”

“Come on,” he says again. The closer we get to the orifice the deader his voice gets. He keeps looking over his shoulder but there isn’t anything there, at least not yet; a pair of headlights are cresting the ridge and I can see people piling out of what looks like a Humvee but they aren’t anywhere close to us yet.

I reflect, briefly, on how useless this venture is; we probably could have gotten away if Rey hadn’t insisted on coming down here to peer down an empty elevator shaft. And if I hadn’t had such a damn big heart I could have gotten away, at least. Felony trespassing; well, I have the money for the fine, at least, but that’s got to be at least a year in federal prison, nothing to sneeze at. Maybe they have special accommodations for sick people? At the very least once I tell all of the prison lesbians what’s wrong with me they’ll –

“YOU TWO DOWN ON THE EXCLUSION PLATE!” a tremendous voice yells down at us through a megaphone. I nearly jump out of my skin but somehow manage to keep ahold of Rey. “STOP WHERE YOU ARE OR WE WILL SHOOT!”

I stop but Rey keeps going. “Rey, stop,” I tell him, but he doesn’t pay any attention to me. We’ve gotten far enough now that the end is in sight, the gantry is maybe twenty or thirty feet ahead of us and the yawning hole in the concrete is visible, but I can’t see inside it, not from this angle. “Rey!” I yell, but he pushes me back and I stumble to my knees. Rey breaks into a shambling run, or tries to anyway, but his leg simply is too hurt for him to put any weight on it. He nearly falls but he catches himself and bounces back up.

The first gunshot is unbelievably loud, even though it seems to come from a mile away. I hear it crack and I scream and fall down to my knees, my shoulders cringing together without any conscious effort on my part. I can see a spray of concrete splinters rising at Rey’s feet like shrapnel, and I realize the shot missed. He’s nearly there. I don’t know what he wants to achieve. I throw my jacket off and wrestle with the pocket, pull out the camcorder as quickly as I can force my shaking hands to operate, and snap it open so quickly I nearly break it. I start filming just in time to see the third, fourth, and fifth bullets bury themselves in him, two in his shoulder and one in his thigh. I cry out again but Rey is utterly silent. He’s down on his hands and knees but he tries to rise, and then another bullet catches him, this time in the back of the head, and he is down for good, and I realize that I’m crying, even while I’m trying very hard to keep the camcorder steady to get the shot of Rey’s supine body, one hand extending forward, reaching for the edge of the orifice, just ten feet away from him, a shocking red spray of arterial blood staining the concrete ahead of him like a punctuation.

Then two pairs of hands catch me under the shoulders and haul me to my feet and someone takes away my camcorder and they shove my head into a hood and then I can’t see. They force my hands together behind my back and handcuff me and I want to say something witty, quip something vaguely salacious like ‘easy boys, get to know me first before you get out the handcuffs’ but I can’t make my voice work the way it ought to and I’m still crying and shaking and I realize as they half carry half drag me to some kind of vehicle and fold me into it that I’ve wet myself, and any sort of bravery I might have been able to muster disintegrates into a painful, sharp-edged mass of shame and fear and embarrassment and a feeling not unlike I’m falling, like what I thought was just a rabbit hole has turned into a bottomless pit.


	11. Chapter 11

The drive is short and bumpy. The two men sitting next to me are relatively motionless, only moving when the vehicle jostles them. The vehicle itself is loud and powerful-sounding; a diesel engine, I reckon, just listening to the throaty growl of it.

Gravity puts its hand on my chest and gently presses me back into the seat and I realize we’re angling up an incline. We must be driving out of the cratered aperture of the Pit. There are twists and turns but the driver takes it slow and we eventually level out, and then the vehicle is stopping and one of the men next to me gets out and they shove in someone else roughly, almost knocking me over. The man on my other side catches me and pushes me back upright and then I’m knocking shoulders with whoever they pushed in. “Peter?” I whisper as the car starts back up, and I feel him turn his head towards me.

“Shh,” he says, but I can tell it’s him, and for a moment I feel reassured, and then I realize that if he got caught as well I have no support on the outside, hell, nobody even knows I’m in here, and my stomach drops further.

“What about Bao?” I whisper.

The man to my left tells me to shut up at the same time Peter does and I sink back in the seat, the edge of the handcuffs grinding painfully into the little nub of bone at the edge of my wrist, feeling appropriately chastened.

With my head in a hood like this all I can see is Rey getting splattered against the white concrete of the Pit’s floor. I see it over and over again, on repeat in the darkness behind my eyelids, in the darkness of the hood when I open my eyes to try and get at least a little visual input to focus on. The fabric is too opaque, I can’t see anything, I can’t even tell whether I opened my eyes or not.

I realize, as I feel a drop of salty liquid edging at the corner of my mouth, that I’m crying.

The vehicle rumbles along for another ten minutes before rattling to a stop, and then the men pile us out and, one hand on my shoulder and the other in the small of my back, push us forward and into some sort of building. We pass through hallways and corridors and then we’re pushed down into chairs. I can still sense Peter next to me, sitting down just like I am, and I can hear the clink of his cuffs same as mine as the men uncuff us and then recuff us with our hands in front of our bodies. Small mercies, I think. My shoulders had been starting to get tired.

“Peter?” I whisper.

“I’m here,” he says.

“Oh, thank god,” I mutter. If I’d been alone it would have been ten times worse.

“Be cool,” he tells me.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“Shh,” he says again, and I roll my eyes beneath the hood.

“Look, I didn’t –“ I start, but he shushes me harder.

I can feel myself starting to get angry but then I bite it back down. I’m really not in a position to talk; arguably this is all my fault. If I’d just left Rey, just let him crawl to the orifice, he’d be the only one in trouble, we probably could have gotten back through the pipe and left by the time they’d seen him. But I hadn’t had the heart to –

“Take their hoods off,” someone says, and then somebody’s hands are at my neck and I feel a tiny choke of fear before they grab ahold of the hood and roll it off me and I have to screw my eyes shut against the bright light assaulting them. I manage to crack one eye open into a squint and see a grimy interrogation room straight out of Law and Order or something. Bright ceiling lamp, check; metal table, check; massive mirror along one wall, probably two-way, check; grubby balding man with several days’ worth of stubble sitting across from us, arms folded, check.

Next to me Peter is blinking away the stabbing light of the overhead lamp but I’m too busy staring at the man across from us. “Hey, wait a minute,” I say. “I know you.”

He colors brightly. “Ah yes,” he says. “The reporter. Who knew you’d be the person involved in smuggling people into the Pit.”

Peter looks over at me. “Shut up,” he says very seriously.

“I think she wants to talk,” the man says. “Why don’t you keep talking?”

“Are you a cop?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. Next to me Peter laughs.

“They wouldn’t let cops in here,” he tells me.

“So what authority do you have to hold us here?” I ask the man. He barks out a short, humorless laugh.

“You two do realize how much trouble you’re in, don’t you?”

“I assume you’re about to tell us anyway,” I grumble.

“You’ve broken into a high-security Federal installation,” he says. “I don’t know how you did it but trust me, we’ll find out. The penalties for what you’ve done are –“

“Yeah,” I say. “I know. I did the research. Five hundred dollar fine and felony trespassing. You want to hand us over to the cops now?”

“Roan,” Peter groans.

“There’s also the small issue of the man you got killed,” he says, inclining his head towards me. My mouth drops open.

“Excuse me,” I start. “ _I_ was not the person who shot him.”

“Roan,” Peter says again, “shut up.”

I whip my head around to stare at him but he stares back, unafraid, eyes narrowed, and I feel myself falter for a moment. “Could you be a little more helpful?” I ask him. “All I’m trying to –“

“You won’t be able to talk your way out of this,” Peter tells me.

I screw my mouth shut and look away from him. The man across the table from us leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “How did you two get in?” he asks.

My cheeks are still burning and my stomach is a queasy hell of apprehension and fear and anger. I don’t trust myself to answer so I don’t say anything. Peter is equally silent. The man gives us a moment or two then sighs. “It’ll be a lot easier for you if you just tell us,” he says. Peter looks over at me.

“Don’t say anything,” he warns me again, and I roll my eyes at him.

“Yeah, I know,” I snap. “I’m not stupid.”

“Oh really?” he asks, giving me a sardonic little grin. I can feel my blood starting to boil. Then he turns and deliberately looks away from me and I nearly snap, nearly, except somehow I manage to bite it back down. The man across from us is watching the exchange like it was a soap opera.

“So,” he says after a moment, “I take it getting somebody killed wasn’t part of the plan?”

We are silent.

“What were you trying to do?” he asks me. “Surely you knew that if you tried to go down the main orifice you’d be spotted.”

“I was –“ I start, and then cut myself off.

“Go on.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Mm,” the man says, a little noncommittal grunt.

The door slams open and we all jump. A short, willowy woman in a jumpsuit walks in, eyes fixed on the man across from us as though she were a shark and he a tuna. She has a white padded patch strapped across one eye and beneath it I can see mottled, scarred flesh, but her other eye is broad and green and fiery, set in her cheek like a jewel.

“Mister Farquhar,” she says. “Get out.”

Farquhar swallows, but stands his ground. “I wasn’t aware you were still on the base.”

She stares at him for a moment. “Farquhar,” she says, “you blithering idiot, I _live_ on the base. You really thought they wouldn’t wake me up for what happened tonight?”

“I just thought –“

“No, you didn’t _think_ at all. Why are you here? Why are you trying to do Security’s job?”

He puffs his chest up a little but the effect is underwhelming. “I was in charge tonight, I was under the impression that as the overnight Director –“

“Just because you run the overnight shift in the admin building doesn’t give you blanket oversight over everything in this damn complex. Now get the hell out of my interrogation room and let me do my damn job.”

At this the woman glances over at us, her good eye raking me like a laser, and then her gaze fixes on Peter and for a moment, just a moment, I see something resembling shock lurking in her face, but her composure returns so quickly it leaves me wondering if I even saw it.

My eyes narrow. It can’t be – can it?

Farquhar is still standing there, his arms crossed over his gut. “Since when do you perform interrogations personally?”

“When somebody fucking dies, Farquhar,” the woman says, rounding on him. She has to look up at him but he still takes a step back. “Now are you going to get out of here or am I going to have to have you thrown out?”

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters. He shuffles towards the door. “I’m going to file a complaint!” he calls from down the hallway.

The woman shakes her head. I glance over at Peter; he’s watching her like his eyes have never seen anything else.

She closes the door and then looks over at the mirror on the opposite wall. “Turn the camera and microphone off,” she says, “and then get out.”

A moment passes, and then the speaker on the wall crackles to life. “Uh, ma’am,” a voice says, “I don’t think the regulations –“

“I wrote the regulations. Just do it.”

The speaker clicks off and then the tiny red light beneath the camera next to it slowly fades. The woman waits another minute or so and then turns to us, her eye fixed on Peter. Her expression is so mixed I can’t even begin to decipher it.

“Hello, Peter,” she says.

“Hello, Mak,” he says.

* * *

“This is a fine fucking mess you’ve put me in,” she tells Peter, her legs resting crossed up on the table, head resting on one fist, balled against her cheekbone.

“I didn’t mean to,” he says. She rolls her eyes.

She’s prettier than I thought she’d be, even with her eye. It must be horrible, I think to myself, eyeing the edges of the scar where it pokes out from beneath the patch like a spider just a little too large for the rock it’s hiding beneath.

“What,” she says, “so just because you didn’t mean to get anybody killed I have to stick my neck out another couple of inches for you? I told you you had to stop! I told you what would happen if you got caught again! What, did you think I was joking? And who the hell is she?”

I’d zoned out a little bit; Makado has a tiny curl of an accent wrapping itself around her words like a snake, and I had been trying to identify it, but as she turns her baleful eye in my direction I find the trepidation sinking back into my bones like a lightning bolt. Whatever she’d been like before, whatever ended up happening to her, Makado had clearly changed.

“Her name is Roan,” Peter says, glancing over at me. “She’s –“

“Your girlfriend?” Makado finishes, disdainfully, curling her lip at him.

“No!” we both blurt out, nearly at the same time. We look at each other for another moment before I answer.

“No, I’m not his girlfriend,” I tell Makado. “I’m a reporter.”

Evidently this was the wrong thing to say, because she throws her hands in the air helplessly and laughs at Peter. “Really?” she asks him. “A reporter? Christ, I wish she _was_ your girlfriend. It’d –“

“Look, I know I can’t use any of the information I’ve gathered,” I tell her. “I’m not going to put it out there. That wasn’t my intention.”

“Right,” Makado says, clearly not believing me. “What do you know, anyway? What’s he told you?”

“Pretty much everything that happened that night,” Peter says. “Except how we got out the second time.”

“Everything?” Makado asks, and to my great surprise I see a faint, faint blush coloring the caramel skin beneath the freckles on her cheeks. Peter is smiling lightly.

“Yeah,” he says. “She’s just curious.”

“You realize,” Makado says, her eye flicking between us, “that things that are secrets are usually that way for a reason?”

Peter spreads his hands, or tries to; the handcuffs stop them. He glances down at them, then up at Makado, and she grins at him. “No chance,” she tells him.

“Why the hell were your people so edgy tonight?” he asks. “You didn’t have to shoot that guy.”

“Let’s just say you picked a bad night to do this.”

“Do you want to explain or are you going to just be cryptic?”

“If I told you,” she says, trailing off, drawing an exaggerated finger across her neck. She turns in her chair, kicks her legs off of the table. “You,” she says, pointing to me. “Your name is…Rowan?”

“Roan,” I say. “Like the horse.”

“Huh,” Makado says. “That’s a new one. Look, why are you here? Why are you tangled up with this guy?” she asks, nodding to Peter. “And why the hell were you helping that stiff to the orifice?”

“She didn’t know he was going to try and jump,” Peter says.

“I thought he just wanted to look at it,” I say lamely, and Peter sighs next to me.

“I _told_ you,” he says. “I told you not to go onto the plate no matter what.”

“He broke his fucking leg,” I snap. “He kept trying to walk on it. He was going to crawl on his hands and fucking knees over there. I had to help him.”

Peter lapses into a silence. “Well,” Makado says after a moment. “At least one of you has a conscience.”

“Oh, shut up,” Peter growls. “Don’t fucking snipe at me, Mak, you’re just as complicit in this as I am. As we are.”

I am very glad that the look Makado is giving Peter is not directed at me. “Are you threatening me?” she says softly, her voice icy. Peter looks away.

“No,” he says.

“Tell me how you’re getting in,” she says. Peter blows out a big breath.

“So that’s it?” he asks. “No more plausible deniability, no more –“

“I told you last month when we caught you,” she snaps, “that you had to stop. That I couldn’t _protect_ you any more. The first couple of times it was fine. Just a harmless washed-up fucking dickhead ranger brain-fucked from the goddam Pit using some secret way inside only he knew. That story doesn’t hold up if it keeps happening! I told you that the next time you came in here I’d have to call the FBI like I’m goddam supposed to. Do you really think people aren’t breathing down my neck too? Do you think I just have carte blanche to run things how I want to in here?”

“I know you don’t,” Peter says.

“Please tell me why you came in here. Give me something. Give me some reason to believe that if I get you out of this, if I save your ass for the hundredth time, you aren’t going to be back in this same goddam room next month.”

“They book a month out,” Peter says helplessly. “I had a girl come in from fucking China for this. Even if I had the heart to tell her no and send her back I don’t have the damn money to buy her a return ticket. I closed everything down the minute I got home a month ago.”

The look on Makado’s face is so painful. She stares at Peter for a moment before she brings her hand to her face, massages the bridge of her nose. I notice that she stays very carefully on the right side of her face, away from the pale, sallow skin near her eyepatch on the left side.

“It’s my fault,” I say after a moment. “I ran into Peter a few nights ago when he was taking some people in. We got to talking and he told me almost the whole story of what happened that night, in 2007 I mean. I asked him if he could take me in too and he agreed. That’s all. It would have been fine if I hadn’t have been there.”

“What’s your angle?” Makado says. “Are you writing a story on the Pit?”

“I thought I was going to but after everything I’ve heard, not any more.”

Her eye flicks over to Peter. “Have you been telling secrets?” she asks.

“I may have told her a few things that the official report…neglected.”

“God, you never do things by half, do you?”

“Have you called the feds yet?”

“No,” she says. “But somebody died. They are going to find out. I can’t cover something like that up.”

“Mm,” Peter grunts. “Alright. There’s a guy from the cult in Bronchial right now, probably heading over to the Domes or down to the Cord. I’ll go in, grab him, bring him back out, there’s your scapegoat.”

Makado slaps the table with her hand. “Enough. No scapegoats. You aren’t a fucking cowboy. I will try and cover for you but this is the absolute last time. You have worn out all of your fucking goodwill, Pete, and that’s _me_ that’s saying that.”

“What are you going to tell the feds, then?”

“I don’t know,” she growls. “I’ll think of something.”

“Can somebody please explain to me,” I say softly, “why it is so goddam important that these people get inside the Pit to fucking die there?”

Makado and Peter both look at me, and I stare back at them. “I’m serious,” I say. “You told me,” I nod to Peter, “that there’s a point of no return, but surely there has to be some kind of alternative to fucking killing them. And clearly you,” I point to Makado, “were at least willing to turn a blind eye to this. Um, no pun intended. Sorry.”

Makado looks at Peter. “How much do you trust this woman?”

“She’s solid,” Peter nods, glancing at me. “Her heart’s in the right place.”

Something about him saying that makes my stomach soar and I have to stop my lip from curling at myself a moment later. It wouldn’t do. Easy girl.

“Did you tell her - ?”

“No,” Peter says. “Of course not.”

“Tell me what?” I ask. Makado sighs.

“What I’m about to tell you, you can’t tell anybody else. Ever. People have died for less.”

“People have been killed for less,” Peter corrects her, and Makado rolls her eyes again.

“Fucking whatever, Pete. Look. Roan. Are you in or out? You want to hear this or not?”

What the hell, I think to myself. “Peter’s right,” I say, staring at Makado, meeting that burning gaze. “I’m solid. I know I can’t use this in a story. Now it’s personal curiosity. I want to know.”

“Alright,” Makado says. She licks her lips. “So Peter probably told you that once you’re…afflicted with this obsession with the Pit, it progresses until you reach a point where if you can’t get to the Pit to get inside it, it’s physically painful, and a lot of people, if prevented from going to the Pit, end up killing themselves. Right?”

“Right,” I say.

“That isn’t entirely true. That happens to some people, but for a solid portion, you lose your willpower to end your own life after a certain point. There’s a stage afterwards.”

I can feel a knot forming in the pit of my stomach. “What happens?”

“The compulsion becomes virulently contagious,” Peter says. “It isn’t a normal disease so it doesn’t have a normal vector of transmission; we don’t know _how_ it does it exactly, but it uses emotion. Feeling strong emotion yourself, like fear or anger, if you’re afflicted, can plant the seed of the compulsion in people near you, and then they go through the same process, and…”

I look at Makado. She nods. “The only way to wipe it out,” she says, nodding to Peter, “is an experimental type of drug called an anabiotic. Dulls your personality, inhibits emotional response. Keep that state up for long enough, that can kill the – disease, or whatever it is.”

“The catch is,” Peter says, “that if you keep that state up for long enough, it can also become permanent.”

“Jesus,” I breathe.

“The only good thing,” Makado says briskly, “is that all the cases follow a similar pattern – they all originated from the night of the 2007 disaster. There aren’t any _new_ cases, just new transmissions. You clean them all up, it goes away.”

“In theory,” Peter says.

“In theory,” Makado agrees. “But so far that theory has proven correct.”

“God,” I say. “So in a major city –“

“In a city like New York or Boston, something of that population density, you can imagine how devastating that could be. Think of how many times you feel emotions each day,” Peter says. “Each time, you could be infecting dozens of people and not even know it.”

“Luckily,” Makado adds, “it’s difficult to get to that point. It takes time, a couple of months at least, for things to get that bad, and before you reach that stage the compulsion gets so strong that most people who’re able to do make it down here and try to get to the Pit. The issue is the people without means to do so, but generally they end up either killing themselves or isolating themselves anyway as a result of the personality distortions a compulsion of that strength causes, so they’re easy to identify. There haven’t been any major outbreaks, not in a large city, but you can imagine how concerned the government is about the threat of it.”

“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why are you letting them in?”

“Because I was one of the lucky ones,” Peter says. “I had a mild case and my personality returned after treatment. That isn’t the usual outcome.”

“The choice,” Makado says, glancing at Peter, “is between letting them into the Pit and allowing them to die there, or catching them and, more often than not, erasing their personality in order to cure it. Peter is of the opinion that that’s a fate worse than death and that it’s more humane to let them go and do whatever the hell it is they want to do down there.”

“Makado agrees with me,” Peter says, “but she has a job to do, and the job is explicitly not to let people get into the Pit. She’s been good about looking the other way for my little humanitarian venture so far but after tonight,” he sighs, “that’s going to change.”

“Christ,” I say. “I’m sorry, I fucked everything up, I didn’t know –“

“It isn’t your fault,” Makado says softly. “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think it shows a lot of character that you’d help that man, even knowing that you’d get caught.”

“Thanks,” I murmur.

“You can send me down,” Peter says, “but get Roan out of it. I’ll take the blame.”

“Nobody’s taking blame,” Makado growls. “I still have a little jurisdiction. I’ll talk to some people, see if I can get this calmed down. I can’t let either of you go yet but there are rooms here, you’ll be comfortable.”

She rises swiftly and opens the door, nodding to someone outside. Two men in uniforms enter the room, tall and rugged and strong-looking. “Take them to the dorms and put them in that converted trailer outside of C, in separate rooms, and lock them in, but no cuffs or restraints. Tell Melendez to call me once you’ve done that, I’ll get him to put a guard on it.”

On the way out, after they uncuff us, Peter tries to say something to Makado but she shakes her head at him and the words die in his throat. Then it’s another ride in the back of a Humvee, this time thankfully without the hoods on, and then they usher us into what is essentially a semi-truck trailer, except the inside is done up with very, very bare living quarters, and push us into different rooms. They lock the doors behind us and though Peter could maybe break them down if he tried, where would we go? There’s a guard on the trailer and even if we did get out and subdue him, we’re still in the middle of the base.

Once I’ve shrugged out of my jeans and panties and kicked them aside, grimacing at myself as I do, the acrid stench of dried urine stabbing at my nose, I reach over and knock on the wall and after a moment Peter knocks back. I think about trying to yell through it to talk to him but I’m too tired for that kind of nonsense.

The mattress is stiff and the sheets rough and scratchy but I manage to fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and no dreams trouble me.

* * *

I wake to the squeak of the door’s hinges, but not sharply; the awareness of the noise flutters downwards into my sleeping mind and slowly, gently, drags me out and into the day. I crack one eye open and see Makado there, looking much more cleaned-up, in a pencil skirt and a sharp jacket, holding a tray with parts for a continental breakfast on it. I sit up and yawn, clear the sleep from my eyes. “Well,” I say, my voice still a little creaky, “does the head of security usually serve breakfast in bed to the prisoners?”

Makado laughs, setting the tray down on the small folding table in the corner. “Not usually,” she admits. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Well, I’m a captive audience. Ha ha.”

She grimaces at me. “I should have you locked up for that one. Oh wait.”

She gestures to the chair and I gesture to my pants in the corner. She goes to pick them up and then stops. “Uh,” she says. “You do know there’s a commode like, right there?” she points.

I can feel myself blushing. “Actually, uh… when you guys shot Rey last night… it was so close to me, and you know, the bullets were going right past me…”

Makado has the decency to look embarrassed.

“Oh,” she says. “Um. Give me one second.”

Makado leaves then and I get up, wrap the sheet around me like a towel, and start in on breakfast. She’d brought a couple of different boxes of tiny one-cup servings of cereal and a little plastic cup of milk, as well as a bagel and a banana, and as soon as the first spoonful of Raisin Bran hit my tongue I realized how hungry I was.

Makado returns while I’m halfway through the banana and tosses me a jumpsuit. “Hope it’s your size,” she says. “We have spares but people who aren’t yoked as hell tend to lose out.”

I thank her, set it on the bed. After a moment Makado leans up against the wall, crosses her arms. She has a thoughtful quirk to her lips and I cock my head at her. “Don’t think you can butter me up with just breakfast,” I warn her. “It’ll take a lot more than that.”

“I’m not buttering you up. I just want to talk.”

“Then talk.”

“Well,” Makado says, peering at her nails. “I’ll be able to get you out of here tonight. To leave and never return, hopefully.”

“And Peter?”

“Peter won’t be leaving with you.”

“So that’s it, huh?”

“What’s it?”

“After all that happened,” I say, “whatever kind of relationship you two must have had, whatever happened that night – it all leads up to this? You hand Peter over to the FBI and wash your hands?”

“I’m not handing him over to the FBI,” Makado snaps. “And don’t presume you know what kind of relationship we have just because he told you –“

“Then what’s going to happen to him?”

“I have a job for him.”

“A job?”

“Yeah. A job. He has a unique skillset,” Makado shrugs. “And we need more rangers at the moment. One and done. And then he stops fucking letting people in here.”

I think about that for a moment. “Alright, let me help, then.”

She stares at me. “This is not a negotiation,” she says softly. “You don’t get to make demands –“

“I’m not making demands. I have skillsets too. You need reports written? You want someone there to take pictures? I can work a camera, a big one, news quality. Video or stills, I can do ‘em both. I used to work for KGIM down in Dallas.”

“Jesus Christ,” Makado says. “I’m not hiring you. You’re lucky you’re getting out of here without any charges.”

“Goddam it,” I mutter. “Look, I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I don’t want this story to end like this. I don’t want to have to walk out of here knowing that I never got to the bottom of it. I know I can’t fucking write about it, I can’t do anything with it, but it’s going to eat me alive if I never know what really happened.”

“Would it really be so bad to just let it go? Go back to whatever you were doing before?”

“I wasn’t –“ I start, but then I stop. “Yes,” I say, in a small voice, knowing I sound like a child. “It would. It’d kill me.”

Makado shakes her head. “I can’t figure you out. I find it very, very hard to believe you aren’t writing a story on this.”

“If there is one, it’s in my head. I’m not an idiot, I don’t want to get disappeared.”

“I don’t know what you think the story of this place is, but it’s probably a lot better in your imagination. You ought to write a book. It’d probably sell.”

“It wouldn’t be _true_.”

“So the truth is what matters?”

“Yeah. Most of the time.”

Makado laughs, a hollow little rattle. “I wish I had your optimism.”

I look at her. “What happened down there? With the amalgam?”

She yawns. “I lost my eye. Then I got out. Then I lived happily ever after. Now I’m here dealing with you.”

“Peter is a much better storyteller than you are.”

She really laughs, then, and for a moment, just a moment, I think I catch a glimpse of the Makado Peter told me about, the one he fell in love with. Then she’s gone again and this hard woman is back again, staring at me calculatingly. I shake my head, rest it on my hand. “What happened?” I ask her. “Wouldn’t it feel better to tell somebody?”

Makado reaches up and in one deft motion removes her eyepatch, and my mouth falls open. It is so, so much worse than I had imagined; in some abstract sense I had extrapolated from the frail, mottled skin peeking out from beneath the patch, I had assumed a shape and size and sense of the flesh beneath. I had guessed that it was due to violence, due to the amalgam, but the pale white bone glaring at me from the graceful round rim of her empty eye-socket, the way the thin cords of her remaining flesh hang and stretch and look as though they surely will snap is much, much worse than anything I could have come up with on my own. The rest of her skin surrounding the top third or so of her cheek is healthy and normal, but the rim around it is white as snow, and pockmarked with acid burns, and then it inclines downwards like a great scoop was taken out of her face and left the bone from her eyesocket to her brow exposed. It looks completely healed, as though it had been meant to grow that way from the beginning; nothing raw or pink or infected-looking about it.

“It’s not pretty, is it?” she asks, and the way the muscles make that dead flesh shudder forces a wince out of me.

“What happened?” I ask again. Makado turns away for a moment, and when she turns back the eyepatch is back in place. It does a remarkable job of covering it, but now that I know what horribleness is lurking under there I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to forget it.

“The amalgam got me,” she says simply. “And it started to absorb me.”

She sits down heavily in the chair opposite mine and I notice a ring of mottled tissue around her wrist, extending down into the glove on her left hand, a scattering of marks like the aftermath of acid droplets cast over her arms, irregular clusters of them, five, six, seven, eight of them on the left, one, two, three on the right. She follows my gaze.

“I was very lucky,” she says. “I didn’t have any real permanent damage. Except for the eye, of course, but you can live without an eye. You become part of an amalgam, you don’t come back from that. Or if you do, it isn’t really living any more.”

She inclines her wrist upwards, looks at her watch. “Alright,” she says. “I’ve got time. You want to hear the rest of the story?”


	12. Chapter 12

“Mak,” Peter is saying to me, but I’m way, _way_ too busy heaving to pay any attention. I can’t get the image of the fucking amalgam out of my head, writhing bodies glued together, pictures of agony. My insides shudder again and more of my dinner spills out into the pool, but I have my eyes screwed shut. If they were open it’d be worse, I could see it drifting on the current and I’d puke more, but with them shut I can see the amalgam.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter thickly. I spit, trying to clear the taste from my mouth; it doesn’t help much. I can feel how tacky and sticky my tank top has gotten beneath my suit all of a sudden and I reach up, unzip it about partway. I can almost hear my mama growling at me in that thick accent, ‘blessed be his name, girl,’ and it almost, almost makes me laugh.

This isn’t a time for laughter. I want to stay here bent over a little while longer, my hands on my knees, but Peter reaches back blindly and taps at me. “Mak,” he says again, and I squeeze my eyes shut and then open them and spin around, glare at him. “What the hell is so important?” I start to bark, but then I see what Peter’s looking at and I stop thinking.

The amalgam isn’t dead; it’s right there, rearing up at us, a mess of bodies, animal, bird, even a few fish, and people, so many people. I look upwards at the ruined mess of the ceiling and realize that all of these people must have gotten stuck there, must have gotten trapped in a digestive gland in their mad panic to escape, they must have slipped under a fence somewhere and ventured out into the Pit when the convulsions started, trying to find their way out.

The amalgam is looking at us. I don’t know what kind of conscience lives in there, nor how many, but none of its gazes are even remotely human. I stare at the eyes set deep in the sockets of an old, grubby-looking man, a thin goatee coating his limp mouth, and he looks back at me. One of his eyes has a thin trickle of blood leaking from it and in the other it seems as though the pupil has popped as though it were the yolk of an egg and is now merging downward, staining the iris like black ink…that isn’t how pupils work, though, so –

“Help me,” the man whispers. I see his mouth move, I barely hear him speak over the lapping water and the sound of very close, very heavy breathing that I realize after a moment is my own.

“Oh my god,” I say.

“Makado, we need to –“

I can hear more of them now, begging, pleading, crying, confused, angry. They’re all starting to wake up. I can see horror on the face of one of them as she looks down, as she looks at her new body, jutting flopping halfway out of the flank of the roughly quadruped amalgam. I can see the face of a bear, its neck and shoulders free of the rest of the creature, turn and with purpose bite into the neck of the man growing just below it, sending a geyser of blood into the air, making half a dozen various faces cry out in pain.

I’ve already taken a step or two backwards and I reach out and tug at Peter’s sleeve, but before I can do much more than jostle him I hear a noise, a small, subtle noise, somewhat like a pin dropping, and I look around before I realize that I didn’t actually _hear_ it, it was just there popping into existence in the middle of my head. There’s a trickle of liquid down my upper lip and I reach up and wipe at it and my hand comes back daubed in red and I realize that the nosebleed is back, whatever the hell is going on is back, and fear stabs me in the gut and shakes me but I master myself.

Peter finally turns and without a word I turn as well, and we sprint to the door to the Dome, pressing out of the oversized double-door shoulder to shoulder. I can feel my head throbbing in time with my heartbeat, each pounding pulse sending another minute trickle of blood down my face, but I can’t worry about that right now – the amalgam is stomping after us, crying out a myriad of voices, calling for us to come back, begging us with palpable anguish to come back and help it, telling us that we can’t leave it here like this. We make it to the stairs before something seems to change, a stealthy sort of decision comes over the amalgam’s voice, and it tells us in a thousand different voices that it won’t _let_ us leave it here like this, and the way they say the same thing but echo in a discordant unity, some ending early, some trailing off menacingly, sends a chill scurrying up my spine, and I shake my head, the blood from my nose spattering.

“Goddam it,” I say, glaring back down the stairs at it. We’ve managed to get a little bit of a lead; despite its size it’s able to fit up the stairs, it can compress itself. I heard a few different voices cry out as it did, along with the snapping of bones, but clearly that isn’t bothering it too much. It’s still down there, seething, digging its many, many hands into the chain-link grating surrounding the stairwell, surging upwards at us. It stumbles and falls but a thousand feet catch it, it missteps but a thousand hands push it upwards again.

“Come on,” Peter tells me, grabbing my hand and tugging me upwards.

“Peter,” I say, my voice heavy, “where the hell are we going to go? The –“

“No time,” he says. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

The amalgam is only two landings below us now. We make it another three, it makes it another two.

“We’re gaining on it,” I tell Peter. “Oh!”

“What is it?” he starts to ask, but I see that same dopey blank look steal over his face, same as before, I know that it’s happening again. My forearm is twitching, all the muscles in it contracting seemingly at random, my fingers flashing curious gang signs beyond my control. My foot whips forward and I nearly fall but Peter, with a great effort, reaches out and steadies me.

There’s a whining scream from below us; it seems the amalgam can feel it as well. I spit; my head is throbbing and that combined with the nosebleed is making me feel glassy, like if I move too quickly I’ll shatter. “Keep going,” I say, trying not to linger on how ragged my voice sounds. I can feel my heart pounding in my throat when I swallow. We make it another flight before it gets too intense and we have to stop. I keep laughing, just like I had before, the sound ripping itself out of my mouth even though I try to stop it. The convulsions have spread down the entire left side of my body and I have to hug my leg to myself to keep it from jabbing me in my chest. An unpleasant thought occurs to me and I wonder for a moment whether this is what the Pit feels like. _Those_ convulsions haven’t stopped; if anything they’ve gotten a little stronger. Not enough to knock us off our feet like before, but if I put my hand flat on the ground I can feel the world rocking beneath me.

Peter is laying on the grimy floor of the landing, staring at the ceiling above; I glance up while I still have control of my eyes. We’re about three landings from the top, and then from there it’s through the bathhouse, and then upwards…

My shoulderblades nudge each other and then my back arches. I manage to grimace before my mouth twists into a snarl. I can feel a very strange sensation in my mind, something abstract, like sparks flying, like what I imagine a short circuit might feel like. “Peter,” I moan. He looks over at me, utterly blank. There’s another groaning whine from below us but I can’t make myself get up to look over the edge of the railing to see if the amalgam’s recovered yet.

“Help me,” I tell him, reaching out for him as best I can, and he rolls, his face contorted with some unknowable internal effort, and slowly, carefully, comes to his knees. He gets to me and scoops me into his arms and even in spite of everything I feel a delicious little thrill in the pit of my stomach as he rises, gripping on to me tightly as another sweeping convulsion pounds at me, stretching my leg out and then bringing it snapping back into his arm. He grunts and I wince as best I can. “I’m sorry,” I mutter.

“’S’okay,” he slurs. I look at him carefully but I can’t tell how this is affecting him exactly. It makes me wonder what’s going on up on the surface, whether it’s only happening inside the Pit or –

There’s a sound like shattering glass and I look around wildly for a moment before Peter stumbles and we nearly fall. “Goddam it,” he growls. The blank look is gone; in its place is worry, fear, determination, a rapid flutter of emotions like he’s making up for lost time.

“You good?” I ask. He nods.

“Yes. Can you walk?”

He sets me down and I put weight on my legs gingerly, but when they don’t immediately betray me and send me flopping to the floor I flash him a thumbs-up. Below us the amalgam cries out, and we can hear the telltale crunching and skittering as it resumes its climb up the stairs, and then there is nothing to do but take one step at a time and hope that we remain faster than it is.

We manage to maintain our lead through the bathhouse, but it catches up when we emerge out into the long, heavy corridor that would ordinarily lead back to the LVC. It stands there, its ‘legs’ compressing outwards to bear the weight, bleeding blood and ichor from cuts and abrasions and bruises. Some of the pieces of it have succumbed already, I can tell; I see several men and women with their necks snapped, heads turned at odd, unnatural angles, made even worse from the way they sprout from the flesh of other people and other things halfway down. The ones left alive either whimper or moan or cry but a few, mostly the ones situated higher up, are still looking at us with something of the hunger they’d shown before, down in the Domes.

Amalgams aren’t known for longevity. A wolf bloodstream and immune system isn’t really happy with trying to hook up to a human one, or one that a bear uses. It can function for a time but infections and autoimmune responses are common. That’s what usually does the more stable amalgams in, the ones that have a regular enough body plan and enough coordination that they’re actually able to gather food.

There’s a tendency, supposedly, towards centralization, when an amalgam fuses together. You might have a dozen bodies flopping outwards like a grotesque pinecone, like the upper body of the one before us, glaring daggers at us down the corridor, but whatever it uses for a stomach to feed the many metabolisms each trying to survive as though they were still disparate units, that’s going to be somewhere inside it, somewhere important.

This is the biggest amalgam I’ve ever seen. Usually they’re pretty pathetic things, just a couple of animals fused together, unable to move, unable to do much more than frighten tourists. Even the larger ones usually aren’t much of a threat; it takes a lot of luck for the amalgam to fuse in such a way that it can actually move around in anything resembling an effective manner, and most of the time they’re unsuited for being the sort of ambush predators they’d need to be to thrive as unmotile lumps of flesh.

Usually.

“This thing’s going to be quicker than us on a straightaway,” I mutter to Peter out of the side of my mouth. He has his pistol out, holding it down at his hip, but I don’t think it’ll do much to the monster.

“This whole fucking corridor is a straightaway,” he mutters back.

“Please,” a dozen voices babble at us, a hundred chests heaving, greedily sucking down air.

“We need to go,” I say.

“Where the hell are we going to go?” Peter asks, glancing behind. It’s another couple hundred feet to the end of the corridor and with no turns, no corners, not even any debris laying around to put between us and the creature. This tunnel has weathered the convulsions remarkably well. “Even if we make it to the end of the corridor,” he points out, “we’d have to climb up the –“

“Accessway 34-B,” I tell him. “Goes straight to Bronchial.”

“And if it’s collapsed? It’s a dead end.”

“What other option do we have?” I ask, trying not to sound annoyed. I keep my eyes locked on the amalgam down the corridor, retreating when it advances. It seems unsure of the reinforced glass bottom of the corridor, prods at it gently as it moves, half its eyes and faces angled downwards to snuff at it. “We can’t climb up quick enough, we only have one kit, one axe, only a couple pitons. It’s either 34-B or nothing.”

“We could go through the Cord.”

I shake my head. “We’ll never make it there in time.”

The amalgam ripples, tremors running through its flanks, and ambles into a walking pace. Peter raises the gun.

“You’re just going to make it mad.”

“We’re running out of options,” he says.

“I don’t even have goddam earpro, you’re going to –“

The amalgam shrieks and rushes at us and terror seizes me in its jaws and shakes me around like a dog with a toy and Peter is shooting and it’s so goddam loud but I don’t care, there are more pressing issues at the moment, and I seize him once he’s run the magazine dry and the gun is just clicking uselessly when he pulls the trigger, and I look over at him and his eyes are wide and frightened and he looks nearly mad with fear and together we sprint down the corridor, our reinforced cleats making ugly, clanking noises on the glass, noises I’m terrified are going to turn into crunching shatters any moment with the force I’m putting down with each step.

As predicted, the amalgam doesn’t give a damn that it just ate twelve bullets straight to center mass, they might have stung but they certainly didn’t put it down, just made it angry. It scrambles now, extra ‘limbs’ branching off of it to seize onto the ceiling and the walls and hurl it forward even more quickly. It’s gaining on us; whatever lead we built up during our mad rush up the stairwell is evaporating too quickly. I still have my gun and a full magazine in it but although my hands are itching to pull it out and spin and just unload on the thing I’d lose way too much goddam time for no reward. I can feel a stitch in my side like how I’d imagine a knife would feel and next to me Peter’s labored breaths are getting more and more ragged, and then he stumbles and in an instant I’m a dozen feet ahead of him and turning, skidding to a halt, and I see the amalgam rearing up over him as he scrambles to his feet, but he isn’t goddam quick enough, nobody could be quick enough, and the amalgam reaches out and seizes him in one bifurcated, multiplicative appendage, hauling him off the ground. Peter screams and amid the scream I can hear his leg snap like a twig and something in me snaps as well and as an orifice begins to open in the amalgam’s center of mass, a ragged irregular hole, red-lined and wet and weeping, opening with a small pop of anticipation, I can hear a feral growl rumbling in my chest, a noise I wasn’t aware I was able to make, and then I find myself sprinting towards the amalgam and it pauses, reassessing the situation perhaps, and it drops Peter and he howls with pain and then I’ve gotten my utility knife, rarely used, out of its sheaf, hidden in a cleverly recessed slot in the ranger suit’s breastplate, and I’ve got it in a reverse grip, arm raised above my head, and then I’m in the air, jumping a little awkwardly with all the goddam extra weight clinging to me, the armored plates, the cleats, the utility pack slung around my back, but I jump regardless and I’m hurtling towards the thing and then I land on it, warm spongy flesh beneath my fingers and arms and feet and teeth and I’m plunging the knife into it again and again, stabbing and tearing and twisting and the amalgam is roaring and batting at me with its arms but they’re too large and I’m right on top of it so it can’t reach me.

“Run!” I scream at Peter. I manage to get a glimpse of his face, pale, wide-eyed, mouth a raw grimace of pain. I can see him hesitating, I know he doesn’t want to fucking leave, goddam it, every fucking hormone and impulse is screaming for him to save me from the fucking amalgam.

I twist the knife again and the amalgam roars and finally grabs ahold of me. I can feel a dozen hands and hooves and paws and wings clenching painfully around my torso, I can feel a couple of ribs splinter and break as they dig in.

Peter’s eyes are very bright.

“That’s an order,” I tell him, and then the orifice closes around me and I can’t see him any more. Inside the amalgam a thousand hands and tendrils and creepers are writhing over me fleshily and it smells like death and rot and decay. The walls of the thing squeeze at me and shift me down further and I realize that they’re studded with faces, with faces of people that have ingrown into the thing, pressed inwards at crazy angles. I can feel the outlines of faces against my back, my chest, rubbing against my face like a dog snuffling against me. I can hear nothing from outside the amalgam, no sound, nothing to indicate whether Peter’s managed to get away or if the amalgam is currently in the act of ripping him to pieces, all there is is the soft sound of liquid gurgling and straining flesh.

I manage to snake my arm down to my waist, wincing as the motion tugs on my ribs and another stab of pain echoes through me, and flip open the pouch there. I find the three cloth slots within it. One is empty, two is empty, three is…

My mind goes blank. I run my fingers over the slot again.

Three is empty. I gave my distress beacon to Fitzroy and never got it back from him.

I slide down the amalgam’s gullet further. My knife is still sticking inside the damn thing’s hide somewhere on the outer skin of it. I’ve got my gun but I don’t relish the idea of blowing my own eardrums out. I could -

“M-Makado?” a voice whispers and my eyes snap open.

“No,” I mutter. “No, no, no, no.”

“I can’t – I can’t move, I can’t feel anything, where am I?”

I reach out for the face pressed against my stomach, feel a cheek spread out into a smooth ribbed flatness. “Makado?” the voice asks again and then I wrench downwards again. I find my flashlight and manage to navigate it to my mouth and turn it on and then the light is shining straight in Eileen’s face and she shuts her eyes, or tries to; part of her face has been eaten away by acid. I can see teeth through the thin membrane of her cheek and one of her eyes no longer has a lid, it’s only barely recognizable as being her, but her voice is the same, a little slurred, a little incoherent, but still her, still the girl I had tried so hard to save.

“Oh my god,” I say, looking at her, the flashlight falling out of my mouth. I try to catch it but a twinge in my ribs makes my hand snap backwards, and then we’re back in the dark. I reach down with my other arm, across my body, and unsnap the holster, then take the gun out, bring it up, clutching it tightly as the amalgam swallows again and churns me downwards. My feet are getting warmer and I kick them experimentally; that must be its stomach down there, they’re passing through liquid. I reach up, find Eileen’s face again.

“It hurts,” she tells me. I press the gun to her forehead and pull the trigger. The noise is deafening and once I’m done all I can hear is ringing. The amalgam roars, so loudly I can hear it from inside, and then it’s pulling at me, arms are tearing at me, the tendrils are wreathing up to my face. I try to scream but someone puts their fingers in my mouth and I choke and spit and bite down and then there’s another, smaller roar. One of the faces surrounding me opens its mouth and vomits on me and I realize from the smell that it’s ballast, it just vomited enough ballast on me to nearly drown me, and then a fleshy cap covers my face and I can’t breathe, I can’t do anything but scream, and when I open my mouth to the tendrils race down my throat and I convulse and try to heave but I can’t, I can’t do anything, they’re forcing my mouth open, and even if I could bring my arms up to try and claw the thing on my face off of me it’s too thick and too strong, I don’t think I’d even be able to scratch it. The tendrils flicker over my face and force one of my eyelids open and then I feel something hard and sharp press into my eye and I scream and scream and scream until the amalgam freezes and I freeze and for a moment I don’t know why, but then I hear it, like a door slamming somewhere very far away, a sound sprouting in the middle of my brain.

The organic plugs in my nose feeding me oxygen quiver and withdraw and I can feel the bone pull away from my ruined face, and the familiar sizzling feeling of ballast starting to repair damaged tissue, but inside my head this is all very distant. I feel as though I’m being drawn magnetically someplace, as though I’m about to bend in half and rip out of the side of the amalgam like a missile, but there’s no actual motion.

One of the faces near me screams, and then another and another. I can hear them very dimly through my ruined ears. “Shut up,” I murmur. “Shut up, shut up, shut up –“

There is a sound like glass shattering, and the echo of it resounds off the curved walls of my skull, and all the faces cry out one last time then fall silent, and I am jostled as the amalgam falls heavily. I can feel the horrible, horrible catch as one of my ribs pierces into my lung and all the breath rushes out of me. The sound is still echoing and growing louder and louder and I scream uselessly, barely more than a vibration in my throat, and just when I think my head will burst with the pressure of that titanic sound it subsides and so do my thoughts.

* * *

“Jesus,” I breathe. Makado nods. She glances at her watch again and shrugs.

“Anyway,” she says, “after all that…unpleasantness, I spent a very long time in a hospital, and came out of it looking like this,” she gestures to her face.

“What happened to the amalgam?”

Makado starts to say something, then stops. “Heart attack,” she says finally. My eyes narrow and she grins at me. “There are some things I really can’t tell you,” she says.

“Alright, that’s fair. You recovered pretty well, it seems.”

She shrugs again, makes an indeterminate gesture. “So-so,” she tells me. “My depth perception is fucked and the nerves in the eye socket are dead so I can’t even get a prosthetic. And I have to wear hearing aids,” she adds, turning her head to the side and tucking her hair back so I can see the off-brown lump of it lurking in her ear.

“I’m a little surprised,” I say after a moment, “that you ended up back here. Peter too, I don’t know why you’d come back and work for this place.”

“There are different motivations,” Makado says. “At the most basic, the benefits and pay are good. Much better than practically anywhere else in the National Park System, and that’s even assuming that you could have found a post elsewhere. Say what you want about government jobs but if you show up with the Pit on your resume a lot of places will give you the cold shoulder.”

“Why’s that?”

“Trauma, mostly. The Disaster was…” she starts, then stops. There’s something far-off in her eyes, something unknowable. I watch her quietly, waiting for her to speak, committing every moment to memory with the familiar mental stomp I used studying in college. “It was hell,” she finishes. “And everyone had their own little share of it.”

“I thought Peter had said something about a pension, or a settlement or something.”

“Oh, there was one,” Makado nods, “but it didn’t last forever. Only if you were permanently disabled cause of the disaster. Which neither of us were, although in both cases it was a near thing.”

I lick my lips, think about how to phrase my next question. “Peter…told me some things about what happened to him after the disaster. Mentally I mean.”

“Yeah?”

“I, uh. I just wanted to know if, well, if he’s okay. While he was telling me his story I never would have guessed that all that happened, he seemed perfectly normal, but, like…I guess I just wanted a different perspective. I didn’t know the guy, I mean, but…”

As usual I make a complete hash of it. Makado stares at me and I can feel my cheeks coloring. “I didn’t mean –“ I start, but she cuts me off.

“I know what you mean. While he was in treatment his personality evaporated. He was like a robot. I’d call him every day and talk to him and it was like talking to a pre-recorded message. Exact same intonation every time, no creativity, no nuance. It was painful, for both of us, I think. He doesn’t like to talk about that time and I know that he still feels bad about not being able to be there for me while I was recovering from all the repair they had to do on my face. I’ve told him over and over again that it doesn’t matter but he still feels guilty.

“He was lucky, though. He got discharged with a clean bill of health a week before a full-on outbreak. Funnily enough the mental hospital burned down about a week after that. They managed to get out most of the people working there but couldn’t save any of the patients.”

She raises an eyebrow at me. “Now isn’t that a strange coincidence?”

“Are you implying that –“

“I’m not implying anything,” she assures me smoothly. “Just pointing out what an odd and timely coincidence that was. Now, was there anything else you wanted to know? I have a meeting in a half hour.”

“What’s the job you’re getting Peter to do?”

“Use your imagination, I’m sure it’ll be more interesting than the truth.”

I shake my head, bewildered. “You really don’t believe me, do you? You really think I’m –“

“You’re a journalist,” she explains. “How could you not be writing a story on this? Only reason I told you what happened to me is because I think you’re probably a decent person. But you’re still a journalist, and that means you’re going to write a story.”

“I have HIV,” I tell her. She looks at me. “I found out two days before I first heard about the Pit. I figured nothing matters any more so why not just – just enjoy myself? I got a plane ticket and flew down here just because I’m goddam curious, took some photos and shit, but I’m not writing a story.”

“So it’s because of the ballast, then?”

“No!” I say, trying not to get angry. “Goddam it, I didn’t even fucking _know_ about the ballast until I got down here and Peter told me what it did.”

“There are easier ways to control HIV, you know.”

“Not for me.”

Makado frowns. “What do you mean?”

I explain briefly what I mean and her face falls. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you really didn’t know about the ballast?”

“No, I didn’t. In the research I did I saw like, one or two references to it, but everything made it out to be so expensive and rare that I assumed it was going to be impossible for someone like me to get my hands on it.”

Makado nods. “That’s accurate. They still take some out but it’s so, so little. If you’re really lucky and the hospital you go to is a very big, very important one, and the department is trying to justify its budget for the year, you might get some. Otherwise…for instance, _I_ would have trouble getting some even if I was seriously injured. God,” she groans, “that sounded so bitchy, I’m sorry.”

“It didn’t sound bitchy,” I tell her. “I swear, I didn’t know anything about ballast when I came down here. Even if I did, shit, where would I get some? Like you said they probably have that locked down tight.”

“You know,” Makado says, taking another surreptitious glance at her watch, “I didn’t even know you _could_ be allergic to HIV medicine.”

“It’s really rare, apparently, is what the doctor said. Didn’t make me feel much better.”

“That’s so fucked. And there’s no other treatment, no other medicines?”

“Oh, of course there are. Experimental, expensive ones that my insurance company would never fucking pay for.”

I can tell I’m sounding bitter and I try to clamp down on it, but I know it’s going to come leaking out anyway, poisoning my voice with a taste of rust and iron, like I’m choking on blood.

“You could pay for them out of pocket,” Makado suggests in a muted voice, as though she doesn’t want to argue with me.

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Take out a loan,” she says. “Pay with a credit card. I mean, there are options.”

“I don’t –“

“Why don’t you –“ Makado cuts herself off. “Never mind,” she says. “It isn’t my place.”

“You can say it.”

“I don’t want to get in an argument with you.”

“You think I’m giving up.”

Makado looks at me and I stare back into her one good eye. I can see what Peter liked about her, what he still must like about her, why he still loves her. She must know, surely. One eye gone, specks of – of pre-digestion, I guess, on her arms and probably the rest of her body, who knows what her hand looks like beneath that glove, and Peter would never have wavered, not even once.

“Yeah,” she says. “I don’t understand why you’d give up. Maybe it’s because I never would. I never did.”

I nod slowly. “Somehow I didn’t think you would.”

Makado laughs, a little gusty snort from her nostrils. “Why’re you giving up, then?”

“I’m not.”

“It seems like you are.”

“I’m not!”

“And this,” she says, pointing at me, glove finger extending out and then back down again, lip curling upwards in a lazy grin, “is why I didn’t want to talk about it. Because I knew you were going to get angry and defensive –“

“I’m not –“ I start, then stop myself. “Alright,” I say, trying not to smile at her. “I get your point.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” she says, starting to rise.

“One last thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you really agree with Peter? On what to do with…those people?”

Makado blows her breath out. “That’s a difficult question,” she says. “I think – okay. I think there are two different ways to deal with trauma.”

I raise an eyebrow. She sees it and laughs. “I’m making a point, I promise. I think that you can either take the hit and get up and not dwell on it, I think you can, you know, accept that something terrible happened to you and accept that your life will have to change because of it, and then make adjustments and move on. The other option is to dwell on it, to let it become you, to let the trauma become who you are. Not that, you know, you shouldn’t acknowledge it at all, that you should pretend it never happened, cause I don’t think that’s healthy either, but I think there’s a middle ground that you have to strike in. And I think I – well, I think I tend towards maybe the upper area of that middle ground. I don’t think Peter’s in the middle ground at all.”

“You think he dwells on it.”

“Yes,” Makado says. “That’s why I came back here, that’s why I started as a supervisor in Security, that’s why I put my time in and when Bruce retired I took his spot as head of the department. Cause I do feel for these people. I really, really do. But I think you can effect more change working from within a place like this,” she says, gesturing at the walls around us, “instead of trying to work at it from the outside. It might not be perfect, it might be deeply flawed, but there’s still a system, and it’s easier to work with it than against it. It’s easier to change it if you’re embedded inside it.”

“But don’t you think,” I say suddenly, just as I think of it, “that if you’re embedded inside it, it might also become embedded inside you?”

“That is some Nietzsche shit that I’m not going to entertain,” she says, grinning at me, but I think that for a moment I can see something in her eye, a ghost lurking there, that might agree with me more than her bluster would suggest.

She reaches into her bag and takes out a smaller plastic bag and tosses it to me. I catch it and look inside; there’s my phone, voice recorder, and camera. “I’ll be back tonight to get you out of here,” she says from the door. “Like I said, I’ll run interference with the Feds. You should be fine. Just don’t come sniffing around again, alright?”

I laugh softly. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“And you’ll have to log on to the wifi if you want to do anything and it’s pretty closely monitored, so you know, don’t fuck up.”

“I’m picking up what you’re putting down.”

“You’re smelling what I’m stepping in?”

I snort. “What the fuck, who even says –“

“Me, I say that.” She tells me the wi-fi password and reminds me she’ll be back to collect me at ten or so and leaves me to my own devices, the door clicking softly behind her. I look at my phone, look at the distorted reflection of myself glowering back, and then I shake my head lightly, let the planes of my face scatter and refract off the glossy surface.

I spend the next hours getting halfway through _Jane Eyre_ before it’s dark and my stomach is rumbling and Makado comes and hustles me into a tan Desert Storm surplus Humvee and then we’re making our crawling way along the road towards the gate, and I look over at Peter, sitting next to me in the back, and he smiles at me but even though he looks excited, I just give him a little half-hearted grin cause everything is settling into me now, everything is starting to ache, and I can already tell I’m going to need a lot of time to digest what I’ve seen and done the past couple of days, and then of course I’m probably never going to see Peter or Makado again.

But I keep that to myself and we make the ride in silence. I look out the window, watch the weird, industrial shapes of the sedative plant and then the angular block of the administrative building slip by on the other side of the glass, watch the way Peter keeps looking over at Makado and the way Makado occasionally catches the edge of that glance in the mirror and looks away quickly, smiling secretly to herself, the corners of her lips turning up just a little before she smothers it.

The Humvee nudges outside of the gate and the same guard in the same MP helmet is there in the gatehouse, and he does a doubletake when he sees me wave at him after clambering out of the back of the car, and then Makado pops her door open and slips down, managing to look dignified as she does, and he snaps a salute that she returns with an eyeroll. “I’m not in the damn National Guard,” she says, and he puts his hand down sheepishly. Then she grins, and shrugs at him. “At ease,” she tells him. “And you can even go back in and sit down; we won’t be more than a minute.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Always makes me feel old when they call me ‘ma’am,’” she mutters.

Peter puts his hand out to shake and I pull him into a hug which he returns after a moment. “Take care of yourself,” I tell him, and then Makado shakes my hand and I don’t pull her into a hug. “Last chance,” I tell her.

“For what?”

“To hire me for – for whatever you guys are doing.”

She laughs at that one, but quietly. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she tells me in a low voice, and shake my head at her.

“I would _never_ ,” I say. I try very hard not to see the bullet puncturing the back of Rey’s head as the words pass my lips but I can’t stop the vision from bubbling up out of some crevice in my mind. I force a smile and she doesn’t comment on it.

“Can you give us a moment?” Peter asks her, and she nods and climbs back into the Humvee, giving me one last lingering glance as she does. She knew, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to hide it, that smile was fake as hell. But she doesn’t question it at least, she lets me have my dignity.

“You doing alright?” Peter asks, and I nod.

“Yeah. It was, you know, a little scary but it seems like everything’s worked out as well as it could.”

“It definitely has,” he agrees.

“Any chance you’ll tell me what she’s got you doing?”

“Not a chance.”

I nod. I could say something biting, something about his guerilla spirit being so easily quashed, but that’d just be pathetic and petty. I feel like something’s dying inside of me but then that’s just being dramatic.

I am a blob of human meat standing here, slowly dying, wondering at what the electricity in my brain means. I smile at Peter, really mean it. “I’m happy for you,” I tell him. He looks at me, trying to judge if I’m serious.

“Yeah?” he asks, and I nod.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “I don’t know what I expected the end of this story to be but this is a good one.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to tell you the rest.”

“Makado did.”

He raises his eyebrows, surprised, looks back at the Humvee. We can see her silhouette there, phone raised to her ear. “Well,” he says. “I guess I changed her mind about you.”

“Don’t fuck it up,” I tell him.

“Huh?”

“With her,” I say, cutting my eyes over at the Humvee. “Don’t fuck it up.”

“I don’t –“

I let a little amused gust blow out of my nostrils. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “Just be – be yourself. I know you still love her.”

He looks at me then, really looks at me, and I can see in his eyes that he is reevaluating me, twisting apart the jigsaw puzzle he built of me inside his brain and rearranging it in a different shape. He opens his mouth to say something but before he can the door to the Humvee bangs open and we both jump and Makado hops down, her mouth a grim line, the phone clutched loosely in her hand.

“Pete,” she says. “You are not going to believe this shit.”

“What is it?” he asks, turning away from me. I take a step back, watch them closely. I smile to myself after a moment.

“You know those fucking CIA guys they were sending? The documentation boys? They got in a fucking car crash with a semi truck.”

Peter lets out a burst of disbelieving laughter. “You’re joking.”

“I’m dead serious. That was Langley on the phone. They’re asking if they have anybody trustworthy on staff to fill in.”

“I’m shocked they aren’t telling us to wait.”

“Oh, they tried to. I told them about the goddam time constraints and they backed off. At least someone is taking this shit seriously.”

I’ve already got my ears pricked up, but then Makado looks over at me, and then back at Peter. “Are you sure about her, Pete?” she asks him. Then there are two pairs of eyes on me and I feel uncomfortably like I’m a rather bruised and sorry-looking apple being picked over at a supermarket.

Peter says something to her that I can’t hear and then Makado shakes her head. “Fine,” she says. “Hey, reporter girl,” she calls to me. “Can you handle a camera as well as you said you can?”

I think about it for a few moments. It’s been a couple of years but probably, I decide. Probably. “Probably,” I tell them.

“Well, how about it? Want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes?”

I look back behind me at the long, dusty walk back to Gumption, and then I turn. “What the hell,” I say, and then Peter is grinning at me and Makado gives me a look that’s supposed to be dangerous, that’s supposed to be a ‘don’t fuck this up’ kind of look, but she still looks a little pleased in spite of herself and then Peter puts his hand out and I grab it and he hauls me back into the Humvee and the gate yawns wide before us and then we are through it and I am back in the game.


End file.
